Shirin’s Development in A Very Large Expanse of Sea and Comparison with Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice In A Very Large Expanse of Sea by Tahereh Mafi, Shirin, the Iranian-American narrator, u
📋 Exam Question
In the course of your studies, you may have worked with literary texts, films or television series about characters developing when facing challenges.
Read the excerpt from A Very Large Expanse of Sea (2018) by Tahereh Mafi below.
Write a text in which you reflect on how Shirin, the narrator in the excerpt, has changed and developed during the course of the story. Compare this to how another character develops in a text, film or television series of your choice.
Background: Shirin is the Iranian-American narrator who has recently moved yet again. She tries to fit in, but as a Muslim girl wearing a headscarf in America, she struggles. She has an older brother called Navid. In the course of the story, Shirin starts a relationship with Ocean, the all-American basketball star of the high school.
In the end, the thing that broke us apart wasn't all the hatred. It wasn't the racists or the assholes.
I was moving again.
Ocean and I had two and a half months of perfect happiness before my dad broke the news, at the beginning of May, that we'd be leaving town as soon as Navid graduated. We'd be gone by July.
- The weeks in the interim passed in a sweet, strangled sort of agony. […]
We were always acutely aware of our fast-approaching expiration date, and we spent as much time together as we could. My social status had changed so dramatically—climbing only higher after news broke that Ocean had punched his coach in the face because of me—that no one even blinked at us anymore, and we were both stunned and confused, all the time, at the perfect ridiculousness of high school. Still, we took what we could get. We were wrapped up in each other, feeling happy and sad all at once, pretty much all the time.
Ocean's mom realized that pushing me out of her son's life had only fractured her own relationship with him, so she let me back in. She tried to get to know me and did a mediocre job of it. It was fine. She was still kind of weird, but for the first time in a long time, she was actively involved in Ocean's life again. His near-expulsion actually seemed to shake something loose in her brain; she was maybe more surprised than anyone that Ocean had voluntarily broken someone's nose, and, suddenly, she was asking him questions. She wanted to know what was happening in his head. She started showing up for dinner and staying home on weekends and it made him so happy. He loved having his mom around.
So I smiled. I ate her potato salad.
School was always weird. It never really settled into anything normal. Slowly, after a great deal of soul-searching, my classmates dug deep and found the intestinal fortitude to speak to me about things besides break dancing and that thing on my head, the results of which turned out to be both entertaining and illuminating. The more I got to know people, the more I realized we were all just a bunch of frightened idiots walking around in the dark, bumping into each other and panicking for no reason at all.
So I started turning on a light. …