Shaun Tan’s “The Arrival” is a “silent” graphic novel about
a man escaping a country and beginning a new life in a foreign land. What I
mean by silent is that the novel is completely made up of images in a sequence,
with no clear indication of sound or speech and no text whatsoever (except in
books with foreign language in the story). What mainly drives the story and
helps put the pieces together is experience and sequence. Sequence gives the
images a correlation to each other and strings the story along where as
experience pieces everything together for the viewer.
Experience, specifically is the main reason why we can read
a “silent” and make sense of it. The book is intended for an adult audience, so
those who read it are expected to be adults, who have experienced or have heard
of experiences similar to those in the book. This allows the audience to piece
the story together by relating experiences to those depicted in the novel.
Children or a people of a younger generation might not get this book, however,
due to the lack of experience or knowledge compared to one who has experienced
this or known about it through voices of those who did.
The novel itself is an allusion to Italian, Jewish and other
immigrants who came to America to escape problems in their country, such as the
Nazi regime. The book however, is universal; the foreign land the immigrants go
to has a cryptic language, strange landscapes and strange customs. The book
purposefully places you in the immigrants’ point of view regardless of the audience’s
language or nationality.
A comic only needs a sequence of images to be considered a comic,
and “The Arrival” proves this tenfold. By depicting experiences or characters
the audience can relate to, the story becomes clear and the emotion and action
begins to make sense to the reader with or without the use of extraneous text.
