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3.The person telling the story; from the story: “A narrator is not an ornament. A narrator is a position.” The narrator stands in for every person who lived through what the official story tried to flatten — including, the aunt implies, the reader.
4.An expression of objection or disapproval; from the story: “the narrator wore the veil in the manner of a costume, loose, rebellious” — Satrapi shows the protest not as demonstration but as dress, as posture, as the way a ten-year-old girl walks home.
7.A government, especially one that is strict or oppressive; from the story: “her friend stopped being her friend because the friend’s family was on the right side of the new order, and the narrator’s family was on the left.” The regime’s first acts are not military — they are about who gets to sit where at lunch.
10.Close observation, especially of a person suspected of wrongdoing; from the story: the form the girls signed in school — “the form you sign today is your acknowledgement” — is one piece of the new surveillance. The other pieces are the chador, the schoolbooks, the principal’s office.
12.Of or relating to worldly, non-religious concerns; not bound by religious rules; from the story: the narrator’s family keeps photographs on the wall, hosts friends, drinks wine at home — all of the small secular practices that, in a theocracy, become narrative evidence against you.
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1.A personal historical account written from the author’s own experience; from the story: Persepolis is a memoir narrated in panels — the form refuses the State’s history because a memoir places the body of the author inside the time, not above it.
2.The leading character in a story; from the story: Satrapi’s choice of a ten-year-old girl as protagonist is itself a refusal — the State’s story had no protagonist who was a child; the revolution’s child was the new nation’s grateful child.
5.A system of government in which priestly authorities rule in the name of a deity; from the story: “the new order” that mandates the veil, changes the schoolbooks, and runs the public execution is narrated by Satrapi through the experience of a child, because the official story of the revolution names the new order as the restoration of a theocratic nation.
6.Told in the form of drawings, panels, and captions; from the story: when Satrapi chose the graphic form, she made the narrator visible in a way that prose could not — the girl on the page is a body, drawn, in a frame.
8.A covering for the head and face, especially one worn by some Muslim women; from the story: “the next thing she walked into, in the next page, was the announcement that the veil was now mandatory.” When the veil is made mandatory, it stops being a garment and becomes a costume chosen for you by the system.
9.The suppression or prohibition of speech, writing, or images considered unacceptable; from the story: the change of schoolbooks is censorship of an early and quiet kind — by the time the new books arrive, the official story is already whole.
11.A fundamental change in political power or social structure, often achieved through force; from the story: Satrapi’s purpose was “not to argue with the revolution by being against it. Her purpose was to narrate Tehran from inside the experience of being ten.” The choice of words matters — n**arrate**, not oppose.