Point of View

Rooftops of Tehran is written in a first person perspective from the view of 17-year-old Pasha. At the start of the book the perspective shifts between the summer and autumn of 1973 and the winter of 1974 where Pasha is in the psychiatric ward trying to remember what happened to him after the autumn of the previous year.

Despite the different jumps in time, Pasha always describes everything that he sees in the present tense. Whenever readers get to the viewpoint of another character, such as Ahmed or Pasha’s father, it is always in the form of a spoken story to Pasha. The reader also sees the point of view through various drawings (such as Zari's faceless angel drawing) as well as works of banned literature that are discussed.

Language and Meaning

Because the story is told from the point of view of a teenager, a...