In Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, Bechdel creates a bildungsroman to share her journey of grappling with reality. Throughout the graphic novel, Alison shares that she sees a disjuncture between her family's seemingly perfect outward appearance and what she interprets as the real appearance of her family. Alison struggles to clearly define what makes this disjuncture so apparent until she comes out as a lesbian during college and comes to identify that her father is a bisexual man who pursued young men during Alison's childhood. As Alison comes to grips with this truth, she turns to other sources to verify her new knowledge of her father. To document her discoveries through this journey, she chooses to write about her experience
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In “The Canary-Colored Caravan of Death,” Bechdel states that her Obsessive Compulsive Disorder led her to keep a diary in an attempt of using the written language to describe the reality of Alison’s daily life. In this diary, she finds the words “I think” and replaces them with a “curvy circumflex” (Bechdel, 142). She does not know whether what she has written is true, therefore, this symbol literally represents Alison’s recognition of a possible distortion in her perceived reality. Her “curvy circumflexes” could be interpreted in many ways, suggesting many truths about her family. Ariela Freedman, author of “Drawing on Modernism in Alison Bechdel’s ‘Fun Home’” suggests that “As a child she [Alison] begins to keep a diary, but the diary is infected by the same anxiety and obsessive compulsive tendencies that affect the rest of her life, and the deception and isolation that surround her cause her to question the most basic facts of her identity and existence” (Freedman, 132). In Alison’s diary, she begins to “question the most basic facts of her identity and existence” through adding symbols of doubt to her own writing. This suggests that there are multiple truths and one can only struggle towards discovering them just as Alison struggles to form a truthful …show more content…
The panel of the lower left side of page 197 shows Alison’s father appearing as “vague” and “distant” as the dictionary definition of a father. However, the panel at the top of page 125 depicts Alison’s frustration because she can understand that suppressing his sexuality led him to kill himself.” Therefore, although Alison sees her father as “vague” and “distant” and therefore not relatable, she also can relate to his desire to “come out of the closet” and be accepted for his sexual preferences. By applying both Bechdel’s written word to describe her father and her own comic panels to support multiple ways Alison sees her father, Bechdel once again demonstrates how various sources of knowledge are needed to discover multiple truths regarding her father’s
In “The Canary-Colored Caravan of Death,” Bechdel states that her Obsessive Compulsive Disorder led her to keep a diary in an attempt of using the written language to describe the reality of Alison’s daily life. In this diary, she finds the words “I think” and replaces them with a “curvy circumflex” (Bechdel, 142). She does not know whether what she has written is true, therefore, this symbol literally represents Alison’s recognition of a possible distortion in her perceived reality. Her “curvy circumflexes” could be interpreted in many ways, suggesting many truths about her family. Ariela Freedman, author of “Drawing on Modernism in Alison Bechdel’s ‘Fun Home’” suggests that “As a child she [Alison] begins to keep a diary, but the diary is infected by the same anxiety and obsessive compulsive tendencies that affect the rest of her life, and the deception and isolation that surround her cause her to question the most basic facts of her identity and existence” (Freedman, 132). In Alison’s diary, she begins to “question the most basic facts of her identity and existence” through adding symbols of doubt to her own writing. This suggests that there are multiple truths and one can only struggle towards discovering them just as Alison struggles to form a truthful …show more content…
The panel of the lower left side of page 197 shows Alison’s father appearing as “vague” and “distant” as the dictionary definition of a father. However, the panel at the top of page 125 depicts Alison’s frustration because she can understand that suppressing his sexuality led him to kill himself.” Therefore, although Alison sees her father as “vague” and “distant” and therefore not relatable, she also can relate to his desire to “come out of the closet” and be accepted for his sexual preferences. By applying both Bechdel’s written word to describe her father and her own comic panels to support multiple ways Alison sees her father, Bechdel once again demonstrates how various sources of knowledge are needed to discover multiple truths regarding her father’s