Gabrielle Zuniga
Lit of Comics and the Graphic Narrative
Response to: The Arrival by Shaun Tan

The Arrival is able to tell a story, by establishing the main character’s current life and situation. We know how the man lived before, and then how is life changed.          

The author uses these pictures to convey abstract and complex emotions. The main character is going through the Immigrant experience. This man is an Outsider and is constantly confused and lost from the language barrier and suffering from the loneliness of being separated from his family. The author conveys his conversations with other citizens of the new land, and we see him with confusion on his face and the face of the others in the conversation, and using a lot of hand gestures. This is an interaction we see in reality when people try to communicate despite a language barrier. The author shows the main character looking at the picture of his family in a close shot, focusing on the picture and then focusing on the main characters' face, showing despair. He is clearly lonely, and the author solidifies that by zooming out and showing the character's room. At the beginning of the story, he is in a house with family, and in the middle, he is in a lonely room with no one. Slowly, in the story, more is added to the room, to show his slow adaption to the new land he has immigrated to. His interactions with others are shown with less confusion on the side of either party and appear to go much more smoothly. At the end, we see the man's room filled not only with his family, but with motifs and objects that were seen in the new land itself; the spiky vegetation that is signature to that land, more clothing/tapestry, etc. It is a repeat of the beginning motif of the home of the man, but at the end it is clear that the man is reunited with his family, but has assimilated to some degree to his new home.