Marjane’s entire life in Austria is flawed by a tenacious identity crisis. To illustrate, Marjane play-acts smoking drugs like her associates so that they cannot walk out on her. She confesses, “I didn’t like to smoke, but I did it out of solidarity. At the time, to me grass and heroine were the same thing…So I pretend to participate but I never inhaled the smoke .And as my friends’ backs were turned, I stuck my fingers in my eyes to make them good and red. Then I imitated their laughter.” Marjane is fretful about becoming a ‘vegetable’ that is why she repels huffing the heroine smoke. She clearly lacks the audacity to give up her friends because observably they are impelling her. Her disinclination to leave the contemptible comrades verifies that she is deficient of self-esteem; thus, she would rather feign solidarity than shake them off.
Notably, Marjane’s facade is not sustainable, because in due course, “the communal life went hand in hand with the use of all kinds of mood enhances, weed, hash…” She finds the drugs to be requisite in her life. Marjane’s involvement with the anarchists furthers her ensuing immersion in drugs. Marjane’s identity crisis protracts because she makes use of her support system in Austria as a Looking Glass for gauging her self-worth.
Marjane’s endeavours to integrate in Austria plunges her in a wounding identity crisis. Marjane says, “the harder I tried to assimilate, the more I had the feeling that I was distancing myself from my culture, betraying my parents and my origins, that I was playing a game by somebody else’s rules.” Marjane wants to live in the same way as an Austrian, but her conscience takes her back to the tenets that her culture endorses. The ambivalence between the Austrian and Iranian cultures cannot be put to rights by way of mere affectation.
After gracing her presence at the anarchist’s party in the forest, Marjane years to have sexual intercourse as she “didn’t want to be a timid virgin any longer.” Even though her culture puts emphasis on the requirement that a woman should only forfeit her virginity after getting in matrimony, her longing to ‘fit into’ the Austrian culture fuels her craving to get rid of the timidity that virginity espouses. When Enrique fails to have sex with her, her low self-esteem makes her to conclude, “It’s my fault! I’m so unbelievably ugly. I’m sure that’s why he didn’t want me”, little does she know that Enrique is homosexual so, their relationship would not crystallize.
After returning to Iran, Marjane is depressed and she makes an attempt to commit suicide by means of antidepressants. Marjane writes, “I followed the film, I stretched out in a hot bath waiting for my blood to empty out…so I waited until my wrist healed to swallow my anti-depressants. I told myself that it was the last time I would see the sun.” Even though Marjane does not terminate her existence, her exertion establishes that her identity crisis coupled with the lack of success have taken toll ; thus , she does not need to stay alive. Her phenomenal survival is wake-up call that buoys her up to take charge of her life.
