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Payton Conway
ENG 201-05
Persepolis and Candide Paper
December 4, 2014
Growing Up is Hard To Do
Marjane and Candide in each of their respective stories, Persepolis and Candide, go
through a coming of age process. In Persepolis, we see that the beginning of Marjane’s
childhood was like any average child. While her desire to be a prophet is far from the average
child’s desire in our society, her childlike reasoning behind it is like most children in many
societies:
“I was born with religion. At the age of six I was already sure I was the last
prophet. This was a few years before the revolution… I wanted to be a prophet
because our maid didn’t eat with us. Because my father had a Cadillac. And,
above all, because my grandmother’s knees always ached…
MARJANE: Rule number eight: no old person should have to suffer…
GRANDMOTHER: But tell me how you’ll arrange for old people not to suffer.
MARJANE: It will simply be forbidden.” (Satrapi, 6 & 7).
Most kids don’t wish to be prophets when they are adults, but they do wish to be the
“heroes” of their societies. In America, kids want to grow up to be professional baseball players,
astronauts, police officers, ballerinas etc., but for Marjane, a prophet was a hero in her society.
She grew up with religion; she experienced it at home, school, and even within the government,
so it was a major part of her life. In her young mind, she sees religion as a vehicle for changing
the things that she doesn’t like in her life, especially the pain her grandmother experiences. The
fact that she believes she can simply outlaw the suffering of old people truly highlights her
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childlike innocence and ignorance. But that all changes, as the war’s impact on her life and the
life of her family and friends begins to grow.
As the government becomes more restrictive and the threat of war looms, Marjane is
forced to mature faster than she should have to. She becomes increasingly aware of the
government and the frustration of the people hoping for a revolution. Putting aside her desire to
be a prophet, she instead becomes obsessed with being a rebel against the government. She
beams with pride over the fact that her uncle has been tortured and thrown in prison. She goes to
demonstrations with her parents, mocks the mandatory veil, wears westernized clothing, and at
one point, confronts her religion teacher about lying to the class. Despite the fact that she is
fighting for a good cause, she is not really committed to the meaning behind the struggle. She is
a fourteen-year-old girl, rebelling against a government that doesn’t give the people a reasonable
answer as to why they are reverting to an old-fashioned culture. They say that martyrs are
helping build Iran, but she has seen that is not true. Martyrs die everyday and yet nothing
improves. She begins to questions, whether or not it’s worth it:
“All night long, I thought of that phrase: ‘To die a martyr is to inject blood into
the veins of society.’ Niloufar was a real martyr, and her blood certainly did not
feed our society’s veins. (Satrapi, 146).
After Marjane has gotten in trouble at school for essentially calling her teacher a liar, her
mother gives her a taste of reality by telling her the fate of young Niloufar. This is where
Marjane really sees that her actions could have deadly consequences and this causes her to
somewhat rethink about being a rebel. She wants to challenge the government, but because she
doesn’t completely understand the revolution, she reconsiders her role in it. It’s true that
Marjane has grown from her childish innocence, but she has not become an adult. She is a
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teenager who wants to rebel, but doesn’t fully comprehend why or what she is rebelling against.
While she does believe that the government is wrong, she seems to romanticize rebellion because
her family is strongly against it. She doesn’t find her own reason to revolt.
In Candide, we see that the titular character is also extremely childlike, except he
manages to carry this trait throughout most of the book. Candide has an inherent childlike
innocence and ignorance that manages to continue despite his many awful experiences. Because
of his early indoctrination of Pangloss’ philosophy that “… there cannot possibly be an effect
without a cause…” (Voltaire, 1-2) so therefore “everything is for the best” (Voltaire, 2), Candide
greatly depends on Pangloss and his “wisdom” for guidance, causing him to barely think or act
for himself. When Jacques is drowning in the bay of Lisbon, Candide almost rescues him but is
prevented when Pangloss convinces him that bay was formed to fulfill the purpose of drowning
him. This philosophy gives Candide the idea that he should not and cannot change anything, as
if he has no free will. When Candide meets with the Pococurante he is dumbfounded that he
basically rejects every well-known author, artist, and almost everything else that Pangloss
enjoyed: “Candide, who had been trained never to judge for himself, was much astonished by
what he heard; and Martin found Pococurante’s way of thinking quite rational.” (Voltaire, 61).
After hearing from a powerful and wealthy man that nothing really pleases him, Candide begins
to questions whether or not he should just accept everything that he is told. He begins to think
for himself; make himself an individual, starting the process of his growth into an adult.
Candide comes to his own after he and his friends combat boredom, by tending to the
different chores of their new home. After years of terrible experiences, he realizes that for him
to remain sane and make life bearable he must keep himself busy with work:
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“—All events are linked together in the best of possible worlds; for, after all, if
you had not been driven from a fine castle by being kicked in the backside for
love of Miss Cunégonde, if you hadn’t been sent before the Inquisition, if you
hadn’t traveled across America on foot, if you hadn’t given a good sword thrust to
the baron, if you hadn’t lost all your sheep from the good land of Eldorado, you
wouldn’t be sitting here eating candied citron and pistachios. —That is very well
put, said Candide, but we must cultivate our garden.” (Voltaire, 75).
While Pangloss still holds on to his belief of “the best of all possible worlds” ” (Voltaire,
18), Candide now thinks for himself, having experienced terrible and unimaginable fates, making
him believe that isn’t in fact the best of all possible worlds. For years, he has abided by this
philosophy, he lost the idea of free will and individuality and yet nothing good came from it. He
finally brushes off the philosophy and finds his own belief that will keep him from going insane.
Marjane and Candide’s coming of age processes are somewhat similar. They both begin
life naïve and have a childlike innocence and both grow from their naivety and innocence
through experiences. For Marjane, the experience was being a child in a war-torn country with a
restrictive government, while for Candide it was encountering horrible tragedies and seeing how
other people expressed individuality and free will. A major definition of adulthood for the both
of them is the struggle of individuality and thinking for themselves. Marjane changes as she
begins to consider whether or not she wants to get involved in the revolution. Candide becomes
his own man as he decides to no longer abide by Pangloss’ philosophy. The big difference is, in
my opinion, that Candide is the only one that became an adult. Marjane never fully becomes an
adult by the end of the book, simply because she is “a rebel without a cause”. You can see that
she has grown when she gains some understanding in the deadly struggle against the
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government, but she doesn’t seem fully committed to the fight, just committed to idea of
rebellion. Yet, Candide does become an adult by thinking for himself. He is no longer
dependent on Pangloss’ philosophy and manages to follow his own philosophy, while Marjane
struggles with the romanticism of rebellion and the reason for the revolt.
Both characters go through extremely rough experiences and makes changes that prove
the transition into adulthood, is not merely physical, but mental as well. Being an adult is about
being able to be independent in thought and action and finding purpose in your actions.
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Works Cited
Voltaire. Candide. New York & London: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1991. Print.
Satrapi, Marjane. Persepolis. New York: Pantheon Books, 2003. Print.