The Arrival

Reading The Arrival was a pleasantly interesting experience.  For one, the book doesn’t have any words, but that make the reader confused as to what’s going on at all – in fact, the author seemingly creates a much more powerful story without them.

The first page of the comic shows the context of the characters and how they are/what they are like before you even get to see them in the coming pages and in the last panel. These panels are all playing off of items/contexts that we know are of families and we know this because well – for the most part, we grew up with a family similar to this one.  We had our picture put up on the fridge as kids,  we lived with parents that had clothing or possessions close to the ones shown – or at the least have seen these as a common media trope in the west as to what a “normal family” should look like.

But then we are shown the father leaving on a boat and overcoming all different kinds of problems. And if you didn’t understand that the father was immigrating to another country, these panels show what immigration looks like to a lot of people in the west.  It shows actions/tropes that we associate with immigration such as health screenings, language and history tests, and the different documents that have to be recorded and taken during the whole process. And again, none of this is done with words but rather with imagery of the human experience. Ideas and imagery that we can relate to - even if we’ve never done it ourselves because we’ve heard stories or have read about it.   The Arrival is a personal story, but for the readers, they are able to project a story, even possibly their own story, on to this character because of the familiarity of his human experience with their own.

The Arrival also does a fantastic job of making the reader feel what the main character feels.  When the main character moves to this strange land, he’s obviously confused and overwhelmed by his own foreignness to the country.  The Arrival makes the reader feel this way as well no matter where they came from because the country is drawn in a surrealist type art style that makes the world look strange and fantastical to anyone.  This also means that for any type of interactions with the strange machines, foods, animals, or language of the country, the reader is just as clueless as the character – which I think is a very rare feeling in literature. Personally, one of my favorite panels (shown above on the right) shows the main character putting up posters as his new job, but because it was in a language he didn’t know, he glued them all upside down.  As a reader, at first  I wasn’t sure at first why the man was mad at him, and it took me a moment to realized what had happened, and this again is a unique feeling that is only achieved by the reader being just as confused as the character.