Book & Book Reflection

'The Suitcase'

The Arrival is a migrant story told as a series of wordless images that might seem to come from a long forgotten time. A man leaves his wife and child in an impoverished town, seeking better prospects in an unknown country on the other side of a vast ocean. He eventually finds himself in a bewildering city of foreign customs, peculiar animals, curious floating objects and indecipherable languages. With nothing more than a suitcase and a handful of currency, the immigrant must find a place to live, food to eat and some kind of gainful employment. He is helped along the way by sympathetic strangers, each carrying their own unspoken history: stories of struggle and survival in a world of incomprehensible violence, upheaval and hope.


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The book "The Arrival" shows a tremendous amount of bravery and fear. The story begins with the main character, a man, packing his suitcase to leave his family. Even by this point in time we can tell that courage is a excessive feature. The man is making a decision to leave his family for a hope of a better life, it takes courage to leave the place you are used to even though it may be in a hopeless situation, it's still a place that you know. His wife and child also have courage for letting him go into a strange place to survive and they might not even see him again. They accept that if he leaves they must stay behind in the terrible place that they live and must learn to cope until he sends for them. In the illustrations, you see that the man has travelled very far across a vast ocean to arrive in the new strange place, where he doesn't speak, write, or understand the language. It takes courage for him to travel to this place alone to find work and to escape his situation back home. On the way he meets many different people who have stories of their own about the danger they have escaped, and how they came to the strange land just like him. 


This source connects with my quote because this man is very afraid of this new world and he stuggles to keep up with the customs and the spirit of the city, but the kindness of strangers have helped him to succeed in this strange place.