As the impact of pictures in everyday life and literature is increasing, so is the importance of visual literacy skills. This essay combines theories of visual literacy, pictorial metaphor, image analysis and environmentalism to analyse visual literacy in relation to how Shaun Tan’s pictures create metaphorical ideas related to the environment in Tales from Outer Suburbia. Three pictures from the picture book were analysed for this purpose. The pictures are part of the short stories named “alert but not alarmed”, “no other country”, and “grandpa’s story.” Furthermore, this essay discusses how visual literacy can support students’ English language learning. The analysis found that analysing Tan’s use of symbols and icons in combination with the emotional effect of picture elements reveal several pictorial metaphors related to the environment. The pictorial metaphors reflect humankind’s relationship to nature. This essay concludes that visual literacy skills are necessary to identify pictorial metaphors and that analysing pictures supports students’ visual literacy skills and English language learning.

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.