Epileptic and Persepolis

Keith Garcia

Epileptic is a strange and interesting story by David B. The story focuses on Jean-Christophe's seizures, hence the title of the name, but main story is about Pierre-Francois who is the younger brother.

Persepolis is an autobiography by an Iranian woman, Marjane Satrapi, who tells the story of her life as a child in war torn Iran. This book does a great job of telling the story about the author's childhood and also incorporates historical elements.

One thing that I found interesting about both of these books are the illustrations that are used to describe moments in the story. Persepolis has more of a straight-forward approach to visuals and Epileptic has odd images to describe events. It is a common trait noticed in both works, which leaves one intrigued.

My question is, what is the significance of presenting self imagination in that manner? Both authors use these visuals to draw reader attention. In Persepolis there are images of Satrapi feeling lost in space because she shunned out God. The space and the planets around her gives off the sense that she is completely lost and also gives us, the reader, that same feeling. An example from Epileptic are panels of Jean-Christophe having an attack. In the panel there is a weird dragon biting his head and constricting around him. This does an awesome job of letting the reader imagine the battle Jean-Christophe is having from his attack. Anyone can illustrate these images and leave them blank but the authors take it a step further and use imagination to make the events more captive.

So if we can agree that they want us to visually imagine what the characters are feeling then why would they choose this form of expression? Well as said earlier in the semester White talks of the narrative and how it is a story told through someone's point of view. That is exactly what both authors are doing in these novels. The stories being told are through their point of view and how they perceive events and the world around them. This makes sense because we are not the ones who experienced the things they have so they are showing us through eccentric visuals to capture our attention. Marjane Satrapi's visuals help one to view her world as she saw it as a child and David B's depictions greatly express the struggle of dealing with illness, through the form of abstract creations that ensnare his brother's childhood. Both author's have created their narrative and thus help to greatly appreciate a tale from another person's point of view.