Alison Bechdel Sparknotes

I give this movie a six out of five-star rating. How it managed to keep me on the edge of my seat the entire time is beyond me; I am still in disbelief that I was fully engaged for the entire two hours and twenty-six minutes. Although I had heard many great things about the novel, the film exceeded all of my expectations. The Natural teaches many valuable lessons about perseverance, determination, commitment, karma, relationships, and staying young at heart.

She looked at herself as a woman and preferred to be with straight men and often got discriminated against for this. She states, “My father hated the way I was…his whole side hated the way I was,” (Berendt 105). She talks about how horrified they were when she arrived at her father’s funeral in a dress and a boy on her arm. She also discusses the difficulties she faced dating black men. Once they discovered her “T” they were often disgusted, one even held a gun to her head. This was her reasoning behind only dating straight white men, because they were often accepting. Because homosexuality was viewed as wrong and they were often harshly discriminated against, not many of them made it known.

He finally realizes the truth about his daughter, which I believe eternally, hurts him. Why is Bruce so upset over this realization? Bruce does not want to see his daughter suffer through the same fate as he has encountered throughout the years. He has lived a life filled with lies; therefore, his life is filled with regret and unfulfillment. He wants what every father wants for his daughter, to be successful with a family of her own. For example, we can see throughout Fun Home that Bruce makes his daughter wear jewelry and feminine clothes, despite her complete distaste to the feminine style. There are three occurrences where Allison and her father are fighting about jewelry to wear (97). Allison refuses to wear pearls to the, but her father insists because there is an internal alarm going off in his head (99). As a child Bruce dressed himself as a girl, now as an adult he wants to prevent his daughter from cross dressing (221). Essentially when we arrive at the car scene Bruce was trying to prevent his daughter from becoming like him. The ultimate realization of his daughter’s sexuality unfolds and to him, he has failed his job of preventing this from happening. Understanding the movement and background we can understand the actual conversation between the two characters. This is crucial to understanding the larger predicament of the situation.

On page 6, she describes a female deer as having antlers. She doesn’t know any better, and this contributes to her childlikeness. Her thoughts give an in-depth look at how she behaves and sees her world. She is very sheltered. Coming from an upper-class family, she has these misconstrued thoughts about poor people. She believes if she ever met a poor person, they would treat her like royalty (9). This resembles how a younger child would act. Children don’t really have a concept of what things are like outside of their own lives, how things actually are, so they assume and make up things about other people. If readers were not told how old Alison was, they would go the entire story thinking she was much younger than 14. Saunders does this intentionally, I think, to make readers react to Alison in such a way as to provoke a very strong sense of pity for her. After the ordeal, Alison is having nightmares about what happened. She is impacted long after the event is over, even though her dreams do not match reality. We can deduce that from her dreams she might wish that the little boy would have really killed him, but she doesn’t admit this outright. We as readers feel the most for Alison. We almost ignore that her age is given because how childish her thoughts and actions are before the event. Afterwards, Alison no longer has these childlike thoughts or things play out in her mind. She seems to grow up in the blink of an eye, and this makes the reader’s

First off, Oedipus and his family had really rough times. Oedipus’ sons killed each other for the throne, his daughter killed herself, he killed himself, so it was a very weird family. To start off, Eteocles Oedipus’ son he was heroic because he saved his family and country from the enemies who tried to kill the people of Thebes. Eteocles of course saves them from the ruthless and ferocious Argive army. “Against our seven gates in a yawning ring the famished spears came onward in the night; but before his jaws were sated with our blood, or pine fire took the garland of our towers, he was thrown back, and as he turned, great Thebes no tender victim for his noisy power rose like a dragon behind him, shouting war.” This shows that the priest and chorus were talking about the war and how Thebes won at the end of the battle and Eteocles died with honor fighting for his country men and family. He was brave because he went into war against his own brother and he was not afraid that in the end of the battle he would probably kill his brother. “For God hates utterly The bray of bragging tongues; and when he beheld their

She was heartbroken and even more hurt when she found out he lied to her. She felt like she’d failed as a mother,whith two kids that sold drugs.

In contrast to Jefferson, Bechdel does not explicitly list historical figures who promoted and worked for gay rights, but rather views her own life as teetering alongside and intermingling with national history, sometimes shaping it or welcoming its subtle influences into her life. For example, Bechdel describes how she has a “hallucinogenic memory of a throbbing welter of people in a large circle”—probably in Washington Square Park, where the Stonewall Riots had just occurred; she speculates on whether “a lingering vibration, a quantum particle of rebellion” might still have “hung in the humectant air” (Bechdel 104). Bechdel may not have been there for the riots or cited them as an active force in her self-realization, but these riots remind her of the reality of the newly born and

Once the reader is able to fully realize that Bruce is a homosexual, her perfectionism abruptly makes more sense. Clearly, Bruce is using his dedication towards the Fun Home as a way to hide away his true feelings towards his sexuality. This would explain why he also tries to get Alison to be more feminine, because he doesn’t want her to be in that phase of confusion and not being able to fully come out. Going back to the scene with the phone call, because Alison has fully come out as being a lesbian, we now understand why Bruce acted so accepting of the realization.

To understand Bruce, we must take a look a little back into his and Helen’s past. Bruce as a young man was stationed in West Germany and dating Helen who was living in New York City. Helen sends Bruce a biography of Fitzgerald and Bruce identity’s with him immediately. In fact, many of his letters to Helen are referenced directly from the book. Alison also tells us that after the biography he read all of Fitzgerald’s stories and saw himself in many of the characters, “Dad does not mention identifying with the character of Jimmy Gatz, but the parallels are unavoidable. This is important because later Alison compares her father’s death to Fitzgerald’s. Helen moves

She talked about how her mother told her about a woman that would murder her own child so that her slave master can not sell him away. It was common for this women to bare a child and when the child was at a certain age, the slave master would sell him. The mother couldn’t bare doing this any longer so she killed her own flesh and blood to revolt against the slave master. By her killing her own child, she ultimate was hurting the slave masters financials, without a child to sell, meant no money for him. As sad as this story is, it was just another way to get back at those who mistreated

In class, we read the book The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls. This book was about the crazy childhood Jeanette experienced. Jeanette had to become independent at a very young age, since her parents didn’t seem to take responsibility for their children. She learned how to do many things on her own, like boil hotdogs at the age of three. Jeanette’s family was also always on the move; they drove miles and miles until her parents found a small town where they wanted to settle down for a little while. She became familiar with her dad’s term the “skedaddle,” which means they would just pick up and leave in a hurry. Because of all these sudden changes in Jeanette’s life, she had to start a new life for herself everywhere she went, such as starting a new school, making new friends, and adapting to the way of living in that

To begin with she wasn’t a fit person to become a mother as she explained that as a school teacher she found joy in whipping her students. She says that her and Anse married because she had

Through his journey to Pylos and Sparta, Telemachus, who was born into a very privileged and high ranking family, learns how to use his inherited social status and connections for his own interests, which will help him mature into manhood. Telemachus was never old enough to remember what it was like when his father was around. Since Odysseus left, he has lived with his mom and nurse. However, for three years, he has been overwhelmed by suitors, who have taken over his house. Odysseus was never able to show Telemachus how to stand up for himself. Telemachus has been less than passive when going about doing things to get what he wants. When Athena comes and tells him that his father is going to come home, he realizes he has been ignoring what he knows is wrong, such as the suitors throwing parties every night, and that he needs to stop them. He doesn’t have any idea of how he is going to find his father when Athena comes, but he along his way finds that he has many resources and connections at hand that will allow him to find out what happened to his dad. Athena, disguised as Mentor, an old friend of Odysseus, encourages Telemachus to talk to Nestor. "Telemachus, no more shyness, this is not the time!/ We sailed the seas for this, for news of your father —// So go right up to Nestor...// Press him yourself to tell the whole truth:/ he'll never lie — the man is far too wise"(3.16-22) Here, Athena is encouraging Telemachus to be assertive, to get what the needs to know to find his father. Telemachus responds, "How can I greet him, Mentor, even approach the king?/ I'm hardly adept at subtle conversation./ Someone my age might feel shy, what's more,/ interrogating an older man."/ (3.23-27) He is intimidated. The irony is that he himself is of the higher class, and if Odysseus had been home, he would be accustomed to these interactions. This is Odysseus learning that he has high social status and can enjoy the privileges he was born with, such as being able to talk to the king. While there, Telemachus learns of the fate of the family of Agamemnon. Agamemnon came home to find his wife in love with Aegisthus, and together they kill him. Orestes, one of Agamemnon’s sons, avenges his father’s murder and kills

In Fun Home, Alison Bechdel demonstrates how myth and stereotyping contribute to the construction of prejudice. Alison’s father, Bruce Bechdel, lived a false life by denying his sexual orientation and created the illusion of a “normal” family life. By marrying a female and creating offspring, he perpetuated the public illusion that he had the perfect home and family. Despite this myth of perfect domestication, the true private life of the Bechdel family could be described as dysfunctional. Bechdel “witnessed only two gestures of action between” (Bechdel 68) her parents, which consisted of her father giving her mother “a chaste peck before leaving on a weekend trip” (Bechdel 68) and one time when her mother “put her hand on his back” (Bechdel 68) as they watched television. Bechdel writes how on both occasions, she “was astonished and discomforted” (Bechdel 68) and suggests that both her mother and father preferred “fiction to reality” (Bechdel 85). Both Bruce Bechdel and his wife, lived in a world where they did not acknowledge reality; it was easier for them to live a lie then to come to terms with Bruce’s homosexual identity. The conflict within the family could be attributed to Bruce’s suppression of his sexuality, which in turn, could be attributed to growing up in a time period when it was

actually shows. The first and second image in the top row toward the left of page 9 is just the