War Narrative and Emotional Empathy through Color Metaphors in the Picture Book Nanjing: The Year of 1937

Abstract

The picture book Nanjing: The Year of 1937 constructs a visual discourse system for war narratives through a unique color metaphor framework, offering an innovative approach to the contemporary transmission of historical memory. Employing multimodal discourse analysis, this study reveals how the deliberate reduction of brightness and saturation in dominant cool-toned hues (gray blue and dark red) establishes a visually oppressive atmosphere, metaphorizing the devastation of urban life by wartime violence. The symbolic use of localized high-saturation red not only marks specific spatiotemporal nodes of bloody events but also intensifies the explosive nature of traumatic memory through chromatic contrast. On the level of emotional empathy, the “visual respiratory rhythm” formed by color gradients and compositional negative space guides readers from cognitive empathy to affective engagement, with its mechanism manifesting as a three-stage progression of color symbolism: “metaphor-association-empathy”. The research confirms that the picture book maintains the solemnity of historical narrative while eliciting emotional resonance among young readers through cross-modal complementarity between color and textual elements. This multimodal narrative strategy provides an operational paradigm for aesthetic education on war-related themes, with its color-coding system serving as a model for the visual construction of collective memory.