She becomes fascinated by socialist revolutionary icons like Che Guevara and Karl Marx and wishes to join her parents, who go to daily demonstrations. Satrapi reveals she believed herself to be a prophet at the age of six, but she no longer believed this once the revolution began. She and her family are disoriented by the rapid changes and rise in Islamic extremism in Iran and are struggling to adjust. Her coed bilingual school closed and reopened because it was initially seen as a symbol of capitalism. The story opens in Tehran in 1980, a year after the revolution, as Satrapi and her female peers are forced to wear a veil. Iran as a nation and cultural entity persists despite centuries of outside influence and invasion this sets up Satrapi's book as a means to help preserve Iranian culture as she knows it in spite of the oppressive fundamentalist regime. Satrapi begins her story with an Introduction including brief historical context about Iran and the events leading up to the revolution. Persepolis is both an autobiography as well as a bildungsroman or coming-of-age tale.
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