english essay

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Yash Chaudhary

Shannon Page

ENGL 245

14 November 2019

Wordless Oratory

The Arrival is a wordless graphic novel that centers a father of one who leaves his native

land and family in search of employment, he travels to a strange new unfamiliar land before

finally being able to reconnect with his family. Tan’s decision of discarding words also leaves

the text with no narrator, the silence in the text allows the readers imagination to prosper. This

quality in the text is what inspired me to write on this particular book. Using captivating images,

the text evokes global recognized conditions of numerous immigrants, the story generates the

notion of isolation and disorientation yet embodies the idea of every man hero by leaving out any

national or temporal references.

The used sources explain how artistry can convey its message without any references to

reality and still be able to connect with the readers. The article mentions a visual from the book

where the protagonist in the novel draws in order to communicate with the strangers in the

unfamiliar land. I will further be elaborating on this idea, as how Tan thinks that drawing is the

most efficient way of communicating with strangers. The second article focuses on the gutters,

panels, shading, color scheme of the text that emphasize the time period the text is from. The

article further discusses the nostalgia and visuality in the text, picking instances from the text that

help understand the main plot of the text. The Arrival without including words builds a connect

between reader and the text, it does so by using visual clues and artistry. The message of the

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story is very well conveyed by generalizing the look of the protagonist and by refraining the use

of language which makes it a story the readers can relate with as their own.

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Works Cited

Junqua, and Amélie. “Wordless Eloquence – Shaun Tan, The Arrival, and Winshluss

Pinocchio.” Revue De Recherche En Civilisation Américaine, Diallo, David, 21 Dec.

2015, https://journals.openedition.org/rrca/685?lang=en#tocto1n2.

Golnar Nabizadeh (2014) Visual melancholy in Shaun Tan’s The Arrival, Journal of Graphic

Novels and Comics, 5:3, 366-379, DOI: 10.1080/21504857.2014.943549