Being a silent comic Shaun Tan's, The Arrival, serves as a powerful and poignant commentary on the experiences of refugees traveling abroad to better the lives of themselves and their family. Through the use of silent story telling Tan conveys the difficulty of communication in a foreign land. Following the protagonist we see his struggle in understanding the language and landscape of his new surroundings. Without the medium of words to guide the reader we are given a stronger understanding of a language barrier between characters, and their reliance on images and drawings themselves as a method of communication, as Tan parallels in his communication with the reader through images.
Through his utilization of symbols Tan expresses an anxiety and distance in regard to the protagonists new home. The suitcase a symbol of what he left behind in his home, the emptiness within a physical manifestation of the emptiness in his home, and how much the character was made to leave behind. The clouds in his dream act in a similar way, conveying a sense of wistful longing for the clouds he sees on the boat as he leaves his family, and perhaps clouds similar to those he would see with them. The clouds are then morphed into his new pet, and the illusion of freedom to travel and return to his home is dispersed, and he is taken back to the reality of a new home. The new pet himself may be a tool the protagonist uses to fill the longing he feels for his family, a piece of his new surroundings to satisfy the desire for his old ones.
The methods Tan uses to communicate the passage of time, and the internal struggles of characters help to guide you through the soundless medium. With the lack of words comes no sense of loss or confusion. With his elongated exposition of changing expression and his portrayal of passing seasons, a dying flower, and falling snow, the sense of time passed is never fully lost, and his use of faded images as a way to convey a story being told about another characters life, often aligning very closely with the past of the protagonist in terms of his plight and reasons for leaving home, giving him a sense of community and relationship with those around him.
