![]() Moved by compassion, he plays with it for hours before realising that it must be lost. ![]() The essential plot of The Lost Thing is based upon the rescue of a bright red ‘thing’ (a huge red teapot with legs? a hybridised marine crustacean with the body of a pot-bellied stove?) that the narrator has spotted sitting alone on a beach. But who knows, given that Shaun has declared of his work, ‘Just don’t ask the creator.’ For these reasons, the reader may be forgiven for believing that the first-person narrator of The Lost Thing, represented in the illustrations as an ‘eraser headed’ young man, is possibly the author himself. ![]() Written and illustrated by Shaun Tan, The Lost Thing (2000) prompts readers to ask: ‘Who is this book for and what does it mean?’ Tan, in a personal email to the author, himself confesses that the work is a fable ‘about all sorts of social concerns with a rather ambiguous ending’, while the unnamed narrator of the story nonchalantly confesses: ‘don’t ask me what the moral is’. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |