Reading This Boy's Life in Tehran

In the memoirs This Boy’s Life and Reading Lolita in Tehran the authors similarly explore the psychological reaction of a negative environment created by the actions of others. Each author has a separate environment that evolves in its own way as the story progresses making the reader really have to dive deeper into the perspective of that character.

From This Boy’s Life, the reader can see that Toby is usually in an environment that involves him go through some sort of disappointment whether it be from himself or those around him. Almost the entire books length Toby’s environment has at least one central negative caused by someone such as, a man his mother is dating, his mother, himself, or a situation. All these negatives coincide with Azar Nafisi’s in Reading Lolita in Tehran, because most of her environments are negative mainly due to her culture she is almost always surrounded as well. Among her negatives are her students that are conveniently always apparent in the text whether they are talking or if she is talking about them. Both environments include an oppressive aura that, in a way, “suffocates” the main characters as they endure the harsh environments until their ends.

Although the environments of each memoir have similarities such as the oppressive aura, and an air of helplessness, they were both created in drastically different ways. Toby’s environment is mostly created by his mother’s inconsideration of his feelings in a given situation, and the effects of that inconsideration in all those situations till the end. For example, how his mother always came home from work one day and would just pack everything up so they could leave as soon as possible. By packing up everything, Toby would have to leave his school, i...

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...thods of coping don’t necessarily move him forward in any way. More often than not his attempts at escaping physically and mentally only put him and his mother in worse situations. But he also expands his awareness from his interactions with them. This interaction allows him to see what type of men they truly are. Thankfully, no matter what situation Nafisi is presented in her classroom or her book club she handles them all gingerly until the end. Many of the instances cause her great emotional stress, but she still endures for the sake of the passion she feels towards literature. Often Nafisi is approached by a student with concerns about a novel they may be reading. They will say that it is poison for the people that it is attempting to teach them to go against their “people”, people being the warlords that control the government, and people with radical methods.