Death in Signifiers: Words and Pictures in Three International Picture Books

In this article I examine the relationships between grandparents and grandchildren in three international picture books in which grandparents become decisively important in children’s childhoods, particularly because of their presence which, after death, becomes absence. My claim is that this absence is made present by means of a strong feeling of longing or missing, which, in turn, is represented through signifiers that symbolically inscribe the relationships between the different generations. Throughout the analysis, I reflect on the importance of considering both words and pictures as signifiers and their role in the constitution of narrativity and narratives in general.