Suffering and "The Veil"

“We all suffer alone in the real world; true empathy’s impossible. But if a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with a character’s pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own” (Charters 1082).

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I found that this quote is extremely relevant when thinking about "The Veil (the excerpt from Persepolis that we read last week). The whole story of "The Veil" is a true story based on the life of the writer, Marjane Strapis. Strapis told her story of how her life got completely turned around after a war which ended up changing her whole life as she knew it. Not only did she and her friends get separated (boys and girl were moved to separate schools), and the girls were now forced to wear veils, but life in her community changed as people were torn apart--fighting over religious and political issues that she as a ten-year-old girl did not understand. She also saw change in her own home when her mother was seen fighting for freedom and then feared of what could happen to her and her family, causing her to change her appearance. 

Because we know this story is based on the authors childhood we start to sympathize with the character. We try to understand what she went through at such a young age and we try to connect what she went through with the troubles of our lives--much like what was said in the chosen quote. No matter how many people we have in our lives that we can turn to with our problems, nobody can completely understand exactly how the other person is feeling or going through. As much as we try to connect with someone else's pain, it is not possible to 100% understand or feel what that person went through. Even though Strapis was not the only one going through these changes in her life, she had her own worries and her own feelings that only she could understand (ex. her wanted to be a prophet to help change the bad in the world), which cause her, in some way, to suffer alone.


Charters, Ann. "The Elements of Fiction." The Story and Its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2011. 1082. Print.