Picture Book as Personal Journey: A Kristevan Reading of Peter Sís’s Tibet: Through the Red Box

Abstract

Peter Sís’s semi-autobiographical picture book, Tibet: Through the Red Box, is about a father’s inexplicable disappearance many years ago. The father, lost in Tibet, had many serendipitous adventures, and the book celebrates that extraordinary journey. But Sís’s book is also about the crippling pain of loss felt by a child when his father disappeared. Through an innovative use of word-picture interactions, Sís conveys the pleasure and poignancy of the experience. This essay considers text-image relations in Tibet through a Kristevan lens and concludes that Sís’s picture book is a psychologically therapeutic artistic journey from childhood trauma to self-healing. The analysis not only sheds light on Sís’s remarkable work, but also explores the potentiality of the picture-book genre as a vehicle for psychological processes.