Immigrants and Social-Economical Stratification in an Graphic Novel

Final Paper

Nicole B.

Instructor Schubert

AMS 5

20 May 2010

Immigrants and Social-Economical Stratification

Though only told through pictures a man leaves his homeland to travel to a new country. He leaves behind his wife and child in a place that seems to be rife with dark looming dragons. Once he arrives to the new land he checked through their form of Ellis Island along with other new immigrants. He’s hurried through and sent by the governing forces there to a tenement in some part of the country he eventually finds after some trial and error. While there he meets other immigrants with similar stories to his in the fact that they were all being oppressed in some way and had no or limited power to stop it; they decided to flee their oppressors. He is eventually able to send for his wife and daughter and finally we’re clued in to the life of a second generation immigrant as when we’re left with the images of the girl quickly adapting to her new surroundings.

Physical/Social Powerlessness

The character leaves his homeland, which is visually described as desolate, run down neighborhood of row houses populated by dragons. The only place other people are seen are leaving at the train station. Further pointing to the fact that people are trying to get out of a bad situation. He’s both figuratively and literally powerless against these giant things that preside over the land. Finally the family exercises the only power they over their situation, the husband decides to go and he’s forced to leave his wife and child in a land of dragons. This is the only way the character can maintain some agency in his family’s life at this point.

Other immigrants he meets later describe the same lack of physical power over the circumstances around them against invading giants who burning down homes and sucking up people and they also exercised the...