Alison Bechdel's Fun Home: A Literary Comparison

Fun Home: A Literary Comparison Fun Home, by Alison Bechdel is formed by her contradictions and paradox between outward appearance and there meaning. The nature of Fun Home is written as a literary piece rather than an autobiography in which Bechdel recounts her life though other works of literature. Bechdel is able to compare her life to other works of writing by using allusions and symbolisms. Rather than describing her book as an autobiography, Bechdel considers her book a piece of literature. She is not insinuating the events in her life to be actual fact for those that were involved, but to her understanding of them. Bechdel uses fiction to understand her life as it was and to analyze her upbringing while looking back. In this same way, she uses literature to understand memories of her father. Bechdel’s father, Bruce’s outward appearance did not match who he was on the inside. He created a façade to contort societal opinions of who he truly was. Looking back on her life, Bechdel uses literature to create parallels and connections between her father and herself. Although both Bechdel and her father were homosexuals, Bruce never publicly assumed his sexuality the same way his daughter did. Early on in her book, Bechdel uses a literary contexts to compare her father to Icarus and Daedalus, who are male …show more content…
Despite these similarities, they never seem to forge a strong and intense bond due to their reserved personalities and their divergence in terms of gendered affiliations. Whereas Bruce tends to express traits that can typically be approached as feminine, Alison admits that she has been “a connoisseur of masculinity” since she was a child (95). Thus, even though their share many similarities, their divergence in terms of their gender alignment creates significant tension between the two...