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Children's Literature in Education

, Volume 46, Issue 1, pp 38–52 | Cite as

“Darkness Overcomes You”: Shaun Tan and Søren Kierkegaard

  • Martin Blok Johansen
Original Paper
First Online:

Abstract

This article analyses Shaun Tan’s picturebook The Red Tree using some of the central concepts of existentialism developed by the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard argued that being a person entails a coming-to-be [tilblivelse], and for the person this coming-to-be manifests itself as a task. The task is to become oneself, which involves working through despair and becoming concrete. It is argued that The Red Tree demonstrates this process, with both the verbal and visual text depicting how despair can manifest itself through a process of sundering [splittelse], in which the little girl protagonist experiences separation, splitting and a sense of doubleness. Ultimately, though, this girl achieves a growing-together; she experiences a sense of concretion as she becomes the one she is, as symbolised by the magnificently sprouting red tree.

Keywords

Picturebooks Philosophy Despair Becoming a person Shaun Tan Søren Kierkegaard 
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Notes

Acknowledgments

My special thanks to Shaun Tan, for giving me permission to reproduce these images from The Red Tree, and for his generous comments: “It’s a fascinating, very well-considered essay you have written and it’s always a pleasure to have my work the subject of this level of analysis, placed in a new context, and also terrific to be introduced to a little of Kierkgaard’s philosophy.”

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Copyright information

© Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Department of Media, Cognition and CommunicationUniversity of CopenhagenCopenhagen SDenmark
  2. 2.Faculty of Education and Social StudiesVIA University CollegeAarhus NDenmark

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