Narrative Perspective in a Wordless Graphic Novel: Shaun Tan's The Arrival

Sammanfattning: In a narrative the narrator tells the story, and the focalizer is a character through whose eyes the story is seen. The narrator is thus the one who speaks, whilst the focalizer is silent. The identification of these two narratological features is made with the help of verbal cues such as personal pronouns for instance. Determining the narrator and the focalizer can sometimes be challenging due to ambiguous cues in the analyzed text, as well as narratological aspects which at times can be difficult to distinguish from each other. Determining the narrator and the focalizer in graphic narratives (comics) with no narrative voice, or which completely lack words, must be done with the help of pictorial cues instead. In this thesis, Shaun Tan’s wordless graphic narrative The Arrival is used in order to show how the narrator and the focalizer can be determined by combining pictorial cues with the reader’s general knowledge of storytelling as well as his or her experiences from real life scenarios. To analyze narratological features in The Arrival, I employ terminology from comics studies, literary and film narratology. My analysis shows that determining the narrator and the focalizer in narratives lacking explicit narrative voice is possible by using only pictorial cues.