Considering Fun Home as a mystery novel, Bruce Bechdel’s death serves as the inciting incident which spurs Alison Bechdel to look through the “clues” -- memories, letters, photographs, etc. -- to formulate a judgment about her father’s life. Throughout the novel, it’s clear Alison’s relationship with her parents is tumultuous. Due to her father’s uptight, perfectionist nature, Bechdel finds it difficult to attain his approval and criticize him; moreover, she describes showing him affection “an even dicier adventure [than criticizing him]” (19). She often views her parents in a fictitious sense versus a realistic one; in fact, her “parents are more real to [her] in fictional terms” (67). Seeing her father as a mythic character -- hence, the
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In Fun Home, Bechdel compares her father to characters in various novels by Camus and Fitzgerald and her mother to characters in the plays her mother acts in. In fact, Bechdel elucidates the dynamic of her parents relationship through a comparison with Katherine and Petruchio’s tumultuous entanglement in Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew. In this way, Bechdel fills the lack of affection with her parents with literary representations. Similarly, in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions, he loses his mother in childbirth, meaning his mother is literally absent from his entire life. However, Rousseau and his father retain a connection to the mother by reading her book collection. They read with veracity and “spent whole nights so engaged” (Rousseau 18) with the text, Rousseau’s late mother and each other all at once through the medium of literature. Furthermore, Rousseau blames his inability to concern himself with facts on this voracious appetite for literature; he claims throughout his young life he “grasped nothing, but felt everything” (Rousseau …show more content…
The entire story comes in the form of a graphic memoir, meaning Bechdel can only fully express her truth through a conjunction of images and words. In addition, visual appearance plays a crucial role throughout the novel. Both the house and the funeral home serve as metaphors for Bruce Bechdel “[using] his skillful artifice not to make things, but to make things appear to be what they were not” (16). His skill serves to conceal “his shame [which] inhabited [their] house” (20) and to appear as “an ideal husband and father” even though he was not (17). Bechdel also employs a comparison between Jay Gatsby and her father to highlight Bruce’s “preference of a fiction to reality” (85). However, Bruce’s skill at the concealment of reality creates an interesting dichotomy between his outward actions. Bruce obsesses over everything being exactly right. In chapter 5, he further stifles Alison’s creative expression by committing a “crayonic tour de force” (131) when he usurps Alison’s drawing of Frog and Toad because she colored the caravan midnight blue instead of canary yellow. Perhaps this obsession with perfection serves as a connection to Alison’s own OCD tendencies present in chapter 5, but in addition, Bruce compensates for lacking truth in his own thoughts and actions by seeking the reality of appearance in art and books and home
In Fun Home, Bechdel compares her father to characters in various novels by Camus and Fitzgerald and her mother to characters in the plays her mother acts in. In fact, Bechdel elucidates the dynamic of her parents relationship through a comparison with Katherine and Petruchio’s tumultuous entanglement in Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew. In this way, Bechdel fills the lack of affection with her parents with literary representations. Similarly, in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions, he loses his mother in childbirth, meaning his mother is literally absent from his entire life. However, Rousseau and his father retain a connection to the mother by reading her book collection. They read with veracity and “spent whole nights so engaged” (Rousseau 18) with the text, Rousseau’s late mother and each other all at once through the medium of literature. Furthermore, Rousseau blames his inability to concern himself with facts on this voracious appetite for literature; he claims throughout his young life he “grasped nothing, but felt everything” (Rousseau …show more content…
The entire story comes in the form of a graphic memoir, meaning Bechdel can only fully express her truth through a conjunction of images and words. In addition, visual appearance plays a crucial role throughout the novel. Both the house and the funeral home serve as metaphors for Bruce Bechdel “[using] his skillful artifice not to make things, but to make things appear to be what they were not” (16). His skill serves to conceal “his shame [which] inhabited [their] house” (20) and to appear as “an ideal husband and father” even though he was not (17). Bechdel also employs a comparison between Jay Gatsby and her father to highlight Bruce’s “preference of a fiction to reality” (85). However, Bruce’s skill at the concealment of reality creates an interesting dichotomy between his outward actions. Bruce obsesses over everything being exactly right. In chapter 5, he further stifles Alison’s creative expression by committing a “crayonic tour de force” (131) when he usurps Alison’s drawing of Frog and Toad because she colored the caravan midnight blue instead of canary yellow. Perhaps this obsession with perfection serves as a connection to Alison’s own OCD tendencies present in chapter 5, but in addition, Bruce compensates for lacking truth in his own thoughts and actions by seeking the reality of appearance in art and books and home