Paper 2 - 3

The question: how is home depicted in the two of the works you have studied, and what is its significance?

What is home in each book?

Relationship to the overall meaning of the work

Fahrenheit 451:

• The idea of heart and home, but slowly the TV is replacing it, and the traditional meaning of home is being replaced with technology.

• • He thinks of a house as a safe place.

  • Society as a whole is losing the traditional home. Montag has it taken away from him.

• Montag’s home is a cold “empty mausoleum.”

• • Montag’s search for home ends up finding the dust jackets and the campfire

• Montag lost his home and has to find a new home

• • The concept of home as a motive ties together the novel's entire plot. He starts in the empty dark house where he shares with the dead woman and ends up with the group of people around the fire.

• Clarisse’s home vs Montag’s home

• The old woman’s house

Persepolis:

• Her parents' house is safe, and everyone is willing to see her. Marji’s home is always depicted as an intact, sage place because her parents

• The bombings in 451 and Persepolis are different. It both destroyed homes as a place

• Physically, it is destroyed (bombing of Tehran)

• • It is depicted extremely in detail.

  • But the human cost is only alluded to visually to emphasize its horror.

  • Satrapi emphasises the horror of human costs by alluding to it visually.

• Austria should have been her new home, but it turns out not to be because she doesn’t fit in with the people.

• When she returns to Iran, Iran doesn’t feel like home, either. It’s no longer home, either.

Summary:

• Montag has to escape a broken home and find a new one.

  • This quest for a home reflects Bradbury’s criticism of 1950s America

• Marji’s intact home is destroyed by outside forces, except for her relationship with her parents and grandmother.

  • She tries to find

Persepolis is a coming-of-age story.

Home is more about ideas and relationships than the place you live.

Both works use the concept of “home” to convey their respective message. In Fahrenheit 451, the protagonist starts without a home and has to find one. In Persepolis, the protagonist mostly loses her home and never finds a new one.

Structure:

1. Initial “home”

   1. Montag's house is not a home. Why? “Hearth”. It is described as a mausoleum and contrasts with McClellans’ house. Relationship with Mildred

      1. Marji’s home. Relationship with her family. Parents always take her side. Grandma joins young Marji’s religion by being a disciple. Relationship with God.

2. Leaving “home”

   1. Montag has to leave home because of his awakening curiosity. It results in a complete loss of privacy. He is forced to burn his own house, which mirrors the destruction of the old lady's house and highlights the destructive power of fire—physically destroying his life.

   2. Politics and the war destroy Marji’s home. God stops appearing when she reads Marks. The revolution becomes a great danger for her. The war destroys Tehran.

3. “Home” resolution

   1. Montag finds a home opposite a house. Description of a sensory perception crossing the river.

   2. Marji tries to find a home in Austria, but she is perceived as a foreigner. When she returns, her former home has changed. First encounter with her mother. She goes through the motions and then leaves again.

   3. Both works describe the impossibility of “home” in a totalitarian society and, thus, the fundamental inhumanity of such societies. The difference is a novel is a memoir.

The perfect essay:

The concept of "home" differs in significance between cultures and can be interpreted in various ways. For some people, a home is primarily a physical space they inhabit; for others, it is a more abstract idea tied to the relationships with the people who make them feel at home. Both Persepolis, a memoir in graphic novel form by Marjane Satrapi, and Fahrenheit 451, a dystopian science fiction novel by Ray Bradbury, touch on the topic of "home" in the context of totalitarianism. The protagonists of the two works have homes in very different ways; one might go so far as to say that there is no home in Fahrenheit 451. Both then find their homes destroyed either through their own actions or through the outside intrusion of politics and attempt to find new ones. This destruction of and search for a home is used by both authors to comment on and criticize the societies they are writing about; for Marjane Satrapi, post-revolution Iran, and for Ray Bradbury, 1950s America.

The main difference between the two works at the outset is that Marji clearly has a home in every sense, whereas Montag has a house and a marriage, but neither really provides him with a home. For example, throughout Marji's childhood before and after the Islamic revolution, she is often shown to clash with authority figures at school, such as when she announces to her teacher that she wants to be a prophet. We are immediately shown the parents being called into school to discuss this; her parents both react indifferently, clearly taking Marji's side and not seeing this as a problem. Later, Marji announces her plan to her grandmother in a way which is depicted as childish and even somewhat comical to the audience. Still, the grandmother does not mock her and instead says she will be her first disciple. Thus, Marji is very well accepted by the older generations in her family, providing her with a home.

Conversely, the first chapter of Fahrenheit 451 is titled “The Hearth and the Salamander”, referencing the absence of a hearth in everyone's home, particularly in Montag's. The first time he returns home from work in the novel, his house is described as a mausoleum, and he finds his wife dead or nearly dead from attempted suicide. Returning “home” is thus described as walking into a tomb. The hearth that would make the house a home has been replaced by TV screens and an incinerator used to destroy everything deemed troublesome. While Montag thus has a physical home that he inhabits, it is shown to be missing everything that would make it a home; his wife is essentially dead, and our attention is drawn to the absence of a “hearth”, which at least symbolically Bradbury treats as an important element of a home.

While both characters have to leave their home a third into the story, they do so for different reasons and circumstances. Marji has to flee, and Montag makes a series of decisions that lead to him having to flee, but it is depicted as the result of his choices. Marji's escape from Iran to Austria is caused by her inability to comply with the newly imposed strict religious rules and the bombing of Tehran. Neither is ever portrayed as a result of Marji's choices; she cannot fit in with the new rules because they are incompatible with her personality, and the bombing of Tehran is clearly beyond her control. Thus, she must leave her home because it is both metaphorically and destroyed by the intrusion of politics.

Montag is eventually forced to burn his own house down, but it is clear that this is the result of a series of conscious choices that he has made and that he knows will eventually lead him to clash with the fire department. Throughout the first two chapters of the novel, there are numerous instances where Montag is shown to grow increasingly paranoid, from Beatty's visit to his bedroom to his growing fear of the Mechanical Hound, foreshadowing what happens during his escape later. It is thus made clear that the destruction of what passes for Montag's home is his own choice and a necessary reaction to the restrictions of his totalitarian society caused by his awakening curiosity.

In the end, Montag finds a home, while Marji does not. Montag finally finds his home when he arrives at the forest, which is described as the opposite of a building or even the city in general. He has to enter it by crossing a river and is then nearly overwhelmed by a series of new and unfamiliar sensory impressions ranging from sight to smell to sound that completely change the narration's tone compared to the city's descriptions. In the forest, he finds the campfire used by the “dust jackets” to warm their hands and to make coffee. The first thing he sees is just the fire and their hands around it. The campfire, his new home, is thus the “hearth” that was missing from his house and that he has now found.

Marji first attempts to find a new home in Austria, free from the oppressive Islamic regime, but fails because she is perceived as a foreigner there; upon returning home, she finds that everything has changed. This is particularly evident in the panels where she first meets her mother again. Marji has grown so much that her mother is now shorter than her, and her hair has turned white. While Marji still has a good relationship with her parents, the mother-daughter relationship is thus visually depicted as no longer existing in its original form; the relationships that formed Marji's home at the start of Persepolis have either changed completely or no longer exist.