WEEK 1: The Arrival by Shaun Tan

Shaun Tan's, The Arrival, is a wordless novel that shows the narrator's journey and experience of immigration. The author strategically puts a great amount of detail into each illustration for the reader to be able to make the connection from picture to picture. He uses his sense of imagination to add to the story to show his views of being in a new environment. You can see how he remembers things from when he first migrated to a new place as well as the stories he's heard from new people he's befriended. In the fourth chapter, Tan illustrates his conversation with an old man working on the same assembly line. The man shares one of his stories of being in the war what all he has seen as well as lost, as in one of his legs. To show that it's the same man on the assembly line as well as in the flashback story, Tan illustrates that the man is wearing the same cone-shaped war hat.

To properly convey his story, he uses the background to depict the mood of each illustration. If it's a dark period of time, the author is very conservative with lighting the picture properly with the correct shading. Another effective way of getting the point across to the reader was through facial expression and body language. Throughout the whole book, Tan perfectly illustrated facial expressions of him and the strangers he came within contact of. In one part of the story where he was trying to find a place to stay and a job, you could see the expressions of the different people turning him down as well as the people who invited him in and gave him an acceptance in confirming they indeed had something for him. I believe the best part of the story that really illustrated the best uses of facial expressions and body language was when Tan was trying to buy food. He was trying to communicate with a person of a different language and easily learned that illustration is a universal language.