The Arrival Reaction

The Arrival is a comic that tells the story of a man who leaves his family and moves to another country in hope of finding prosperity outside of his homeland. It is very appropriate that Shuan Tan decided to tell this story without words, because the audience is then given the opportunity to connect even more with the main character and his inability to understand the language of the new land that he moves to.  The audience is forced to understand the story though the context of each image as well as in the way all the images are ordered and juxtaposed.

            Images are universal and are understood by most humans and can be understood just as clearly as words. We can see that each composition with in the book tells an idea just as a sentence would. When Shaun Tan wants us to understand that the character is going somewhere or doing something he will show us visually what he is doing. We can even get an understanding of what the character is thinking and feeling though his body language and facial expressions.  Our human ability to empathize and piece together visual clues is an extraordinary medium that artists have been taking advantage of for centuries.  Also the environment that Tan puts the character in is very abstract and has to be deciphered by the audience as well as the main character that is lost in the foreign land.

            Just like words though images can be interpreted differently from person to person. And this idea is even shown in the narrative when the main character shows another character a drawing and the other character has a flashback to a previous event that was probably not anticipated by the main character. When people look at the images in this book people will see different symbols and will have different connections to certain images.

            The Arrival is masterly done and conveys the story of the immigrant in a manner that is original and extremely effective. Words simply would have taken away from the emotional impact that Shaun Tan depicts.