The Lost Thing by Shaun Tan

Narrator: Unnamed narrator- essentially the boy

Point of view: Addressed to the reader

Setting: Rretro future, over industrialised environment with almost no living thing apart from people. Everything is dull and suffocating, nobody minds about anything, robotic nature of the people, illustrations depict the environment

Tone: matter of fact, deadpan(expressionless), anecdotal, presented as “What I did over the holidays”, handwritten font on strips of notepaper.

Main Character; Creature is never physically described.

Narrative: storyline is not told through text alone, but also visuals are used heavily to relate the story,(could have been about a lost dog in a normal suburb except for the graphics) Graphics: These reveal a freakish, tentacled animal in a treeless world of green skies, excessive plumbing, concrete, and machinery. Relationship between words and pictures: An understatement, defies expectation and creates a humorous tone

Irony narrator’s casual disinterest v weird absurdities

Tone This is important and consistent throughout the book. It deals with apathy about suppression of imagination, especially, pragmatism and bureaucracy, all conditions that affect both society and the individual.

Visual density: This suggests an environment that is congested and compressed, no empty spaces, all images formed by collage of text and diagrams cut from old physics/ maths books. These add a sense of the dry and industrial world, a sort of meaningless functionality

Accidental poetry: using collage, ie chapter headings in engineering manual terms might suggest an unintentional comment about life.

End pages bottle top collection is seen to sum up the universe in an abstract way. First Person Narrative: This suggests that the book is a product of the world and can be seen through the graphics. For example, stamps and signs that appear on the cover and throughout the book, The Federal Dept. of Information, are consistent with this kind of society that the narrator comes from.

Incidental details: In the book these graphic details collectively build a sense of place because of no overt description by the narrator.

Creature: Conspicuously red and big, ironic that no one notices. This is the key issue. No one notices this strange and unrecognizable “thing”. What does this tell us about this society? Creature exists in contrast to the world it inhabits: Its life is whimsical, purposeless, out of scale, meaningless, all these things that the bureaucracy cannot understand. Therefore it doesn’t matter. It is a curiosity only if people are curious, but the populace are “too busy”, doing more important things. Some suggestion that the creature is a by-product of the industrial landscape, a sort of unconscious mutation, appearing on the beach as if “washed up” Not alone, this creature is not alone as the reader can see towards the end of the book, weird things appear in the city regularly but their presence only can be measured in terms of them being noticed.(generally but not all) Symbolism Creature represents things/ people that don’t belong

Comments

 Amusing, non-sensical story, a fable about social-concerns, ambiguous ending  Creature comes from no-where, had no existing relationship to anything and was “plain lost.”  Whimsical, purposeless and estranged from everything around it, The Lost Thing is out of place in a much deeper sense than simply being”lost” .

The environment in the illustrations resists any simple reading: a treeless, industrial metropolis full of excessive plumbing, mysterious and de-humanising architecture, green skies and cheerless citizens.  Nobody pays any attention to it, despite its disruptive presence as a conspicuous absurdity.  What’s going on?- no explanation emphasises idea of strangeness yet familiarity  First person narrator- deliberately dead-pan, no conclusion/ casual dismissal. “That’s the story” the boy says at the end. There’s no moral/ it’s not profound  Meaning must be interpreted by thye reader by close visual reading as opposed to text  Colours are limited to industrial greys/ browns suggests the lack of individuality/ conformity  Why are pieces of physics/ calculus and algebra framing each page?  Houses are all the same, no individuality  Houses draped in shadows except the centre page where all the “lost things were”  Images of the clouds  The strange place glimpsed through the doorway at the end of the anonymous alley  Alienation amongst other things can be seen as a theme  What does it make you think about? This works mainly through resonance(empathy)  Fed. Dept. of Odds and Ends- no windows which is strange and suggests that the familiar prescriptions of recognition are swept under the carpet unless the correct forms are filled in. Meaning is a function of bureaucracy and literacy is there to measure prescribed value.  Visual Literacy is represented by the disruptive presence of The Lost Thing within this closed system, through the use of playful questions, enigma and absurdity.  The creature resists classification and yet wants to be noticed as it moves through the city  Shape of humans like machines suggests de- humanisation  Other hybrid creatures also  Bottle-top collection instead of shells