Part 1: Chapter 9 Summary

Nafisi describes some of the difficulties of her youngest student, Yassi, who ultimately asks Nafisi if she should go to America. Nafisi does not feel qualified to offer an answer. But she turns to literature to offer a frame of reference. Lolita is not so much about the rape of a 12 year-old girl by an older man as it is about the "confiscation of one individual's life by another." Lolita, like Yassi, is deprived of the beauty of ordinary, everyday life. Yassi, above all, must not allow this confiscation of her being. Nafisi sees a younger version of herself in Yassi.

Part 1: Chapter 9 Analysis

Nafisi presents the full contradiction of the totalitarian regime of the Islamic Republic of Iran against the immutable reality of the nature of a human individual. Again, no answer or resolution is available. But literature provides a...