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Themes and Colors
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Growing Up and Growing Old
Persepolis 2 picks up where Persepolis left off: 14-year-old Marjane’s parents have decided that their outspoken daughter isn’t safe in their home country of Iran. Because of this, they send her to a French school in Vienna, Austria. During Marjane’s four years in Europe, she comes of age in important ways—for instance, she undergoes puberty and experiments with drugs and sex. However, Marjane must also confront the fact that while she’s busy with her…
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Identity, Culture, and Self-Expression
Iranian-born Marjane believes that “I would always be an Iranian in the West, and a Westerner in Iran.” This encapsulates one of the memoir’s central conflicts: as Marjane moves back and forth between Iran (her home country) and Austria (where she goes to school), she must constantly adjust her understanding of social norms—often with only limited success. As Marjane comes of age and attempts to figure out who she is, she must also figure out…
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Gender and Oppression
Marjane leaves her home country of Iran for Austria to escape the oppression that women suffer under Iran’s Islamic fundamentalist regime—yet she finds that she faces some level of sexism everywhere she goes. While the particulars of how Marjane experiences sexism differ from country to country and culture to culture, some elements remain the same. Namely, Marjane recognizes that no matter the culture, women are harassed and policed —and that this treatment prevents them from…
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Suffering and Trauma
At age 14, Marjane’s parents send her to Vienna to attend school. This is, in part, to protect her from the Iran-Iraq war raging in their home country, as well as the religious extremism of the Islamic Revolution. She leaves, in other words, to escape trauma. However, what Marjane experiences in Vienna isn’t as idyllic as her parents might have hoped. Bigotry and sexism plague her everywhere she goes, and she ends up becoming…
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