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Marjane Satrapi My Speech At West Point

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The Outcome of Satrapi’s Speech There are about 96,803-105,553 civilians as of June 2010 that have died from violence during the Iraq war. Marjane Satrapi sympathizes with these people and their families. She is against the war and tries to spread the word to her readers. In 2005 Satrapi was invited to speak at West Point, a military base that was required to read her novel Persepolis. She describes what she thought the trip would be like before and after it occurred in a comic strip called My Speech at West Point. Satrapi perceptibly addresses the issues of war, death, and insularity in her essay with humor, and is affected greatly by the outcome of her trip. Although Satrapi is there to talk about Persepolis, she takes this …show more content…

The cadets were very open-minded and admired her perspective on the war. In the comic there are tears on her cheek. They are an exaggeration on how astounded she truly was. Their reaction left her confused about life and what she thought she knew about everything. As she is going home she states “I know that I don’t know anything; that makes life even more complicated…”(p.232, Satrapi). She believed that she knew everything and the way everyone was. The trip to West Point made her realize that she was ignorant about many things, which completely changed her beliefs. Now she knows that she cannot assume that she knows how everything will be and the way people will act. Since she assumed that the people at West Point will be vicious ignorant buffoons who did not care to see other’s views, and she was proven wrong by the cadets who were “lovely and intelligent and much more open-minded…” than her.(pg.232, Satrapi) To demonstrate what she learned at West Point she uses humor in the comic. She exaggerates on how the cadets and major will treat her to the point that she says that they will hang her and she will die, drawing her tongue stuck out of her mouth. She also mentions that they will not let her smoke and they will scream at her. When she describes what really happened she draws happier faces on all of the people and mentions that the pizza was worse than she imagined it would be. The added remark on the pizza shows us

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