Who Is Alison Bechdel's Ethos In Fun Home

Alison Bechdel's graphic memoir, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, documents the author's discovery of her own and her father's homosexuality. The book touches upon many themes, including, but not limited to, the following: sexual orientation, family relationships, and suicide. Unlike most autobiographical works, Bechdel uses the comics graphic medium to tell her story. By close-reading or carefully analyzing pages fourteen through seventeen in Fun Home one can get a better understanding of how a Bechdel employs words and graphic devices to render specific events. One can also see how the specific content of the pages thematically connects to the book as a whole. As we will see, this portion of the book echoes the strained relationship

In the image, it looks like a stereotypical suburban family’s house. The property includes a driveway, a car, a house, a wall covering the house, and lots of flowers and bushes. In just the quick glance, it does not look like anything spectacular. However, after reading Harris’s interpretation of the 1950’s stylistic ways of living, it makes more sense as to the layout of the property. In the beginning of the reading, Harris has a main theme of privacy. She describes the

There are numerous documents (photographs, maps, letters, novels, etc...) that are painstakingly recreated throughout Alison Bechdel's Fun Home, which are used in order to re-evaluate her own personal history. Bechdel introduces the notion that her parents are most real to her in terms of the fictional. Therefore, it is reasonable to examine Fun Home as an attempt to render her father as a fictional entity that she can then process more clearly. In the same way she has always processed the literature she has consumed since childhood, Bechdel begins her task my examining the texts that her father found the most solace in. Through her memoir, Alison Bechdel conducts an investigation through which it seems as though she aims to review and revise

Alison Bechdel’s comic book Fun Home clearly portrays the importance of gender roles in the society. She mentions in her book incidents which illustrate as to how gender plays a major role in forming a person’s identity. Throughout the book, Bechdel suggests how the society has divided people into different genders on the basis of appearance, duties and behavioural expectations. The society as a whole needs to re-asses these gender roles so that people don’t end up ruining their life thinking about what the society thinks.

Picking up the book Fun Home, one would imagine that the novel would embellish some sort of comical life story of a misunderstood teenager. Although the short comic-book structured novel does have its sarcastic humor, Alison Bechdel explains her firsthand account of growing up with the difficulty of living of finding her true identity. Alison was a teenager in college when she discovered that she was a lesbian, however, the shock came when she also discovered her father was homosexual. I feel that the most influencing panel in Fun Home is where Alison and her father are in the car alone together. Not only does this panel explain the entirety of the novel in a few short speech bubbles, but it is the defining scene that connects

Fun Home is set up as a comic book, in white and blue, describing the relationship of the author, Alison Bechdel, with her father. By drawing scenes from her life, Alison tells the story of how her father’s reality of being a father, a husband, and a high school English teacher was deceiving, bringing to light truths that he spent his life trying to hide. Photographs begin every chapter and are scattered around the book, giving context and revealing details that cannot be described otherwise.

Alison Bechdel’s comic book “Fun Home” is narrated by none other than herself who builds the narrative around her family and her life growing up. Then, years later, her father dies in a car accident, and despite not knowing if it was really an accident or a suicide, she occupies herself with finding a justification for his death. Now imprisoned with the task she put herself to, the narrator blames her father 's shame and lack of happiness due to him being a homosexual, which she also discovered herself being at the age of 19. The story touches on several themes including happiness, identity and honesty. More specifically, “Fun Home” suggests that happiness is unattainable if one conforms to society 's norms by suppressing their true identity. This is demonstrated through the comparison made with the character Jay Gatsby from "The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Bruce Bechdel, as well as the narrator’s depiction of herself.

In the book Fun Home Bechdel use memoir to explain her parents creativity and compared her life to her mother and father. Talents such as turning old things into new things. For example in chapter 1 page 6 her father would take old furniture and restore it back to brand new. Her father was an English teacher as well, he had a library stored in their home with books he loved to read. Alison mother would go around the house studying and reciting her lines like the actress she was, and whenever she had a show she would invite the family. Alison as a young girl a young girl would look at her and her parent’s life,

Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic illustrates the plight of a lesbian growing up in a household filled with secrets in every nook and cranny. The subtitle, A Family Tragicomic, reveals the tone of the story for the audience by insinuating the existence of adversary in Bechdel’s family dynamics. Through the use of nonlinear chronology, the author reconstructs her childhood and early adulthood around the roles of her parents, Helen and Bruce, and more specifically, the death of her father. Bruce’s affinity for interior design results in him spending ample time on decorating the family home, to the point that it serves as a symbol of Bruce’s repressed desires and in turn, Alison’s liberated desires.

In Fun Home, Alison Bechdel explains her family, mostly herself and her father, Bruce. Bechdel explains her family by comparing them to mythology or the family from, “It’s a Wonderful Life.” The movie, might seem like a perfect family by the title of it, but every family has their issues. When Bechdel starts talking about the movie it is just “Hello, Darling” and “Hello, Daddy,” conversation. The conversation is nothing like her family, since any kind of affection is not normal. What the movie is like her family is when Jimmy Stewarts comes home and starts yelling at everyone, her father would yell at them for little things they could not handle. Second way they are related is that the family in, “It’s a Wonderful Life,” buy and fix up their

Because Bruce focused all of his energy on the house, and subsequently on upholding the fake façade of his life, his time and impact on Alison’s life were minimal and destructive. Ultimately, Bechdel’s first telling of the Icarus sets the stage of Alison’s early view on her father, but also sets a baseline wherein Bruce can only improve in Alison’s

How do graphic novels allow for explorations of parent-child relationships and/or the idea of family? This essay will look at the question of how graphic novels allow for the exploration of parent-child relationships and the idea of intergenerational family relations using primarily the works Maus by Art Spiegelman and Persepolis by Marjani Satrapi. The primary relations are key to exploring this concept of family.

Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006) constructs the narrative around the tragic event of her father’s death in conjunction with the development of her lesbian identity. The extract is from Chapter Six The Ideal Husband, where Alison feels obligated to record her secretion in her diary. However, upon seeing her younger-self’s diary entries, Alison becomes indifferent to recording her experience of adolescence in her diary. The extract is suitable for exploring how it relates and disrupts the theme of memory work. Annette Kuhn defines memory work as: “[exploring] connections between [things like] structures of feeling, national identity, and gender…” (5). A theme that Bechdel accentuates in the extract through her use of critical consciousness (where a person reflects on their life and others around them) (Kuhn, 2) explores how literature and social/historical events at the time in the extract impacts Alison’s sexuality.

The most difficult time in a child's relationship with his/her parents is mainly during its teenage years. These are times of rebellion, disagreement, strong emotion, psychological changes and sexual experimentation just to name a few. In Mary Gaitskill's short story "Tiny, Smiling Daddy", the main theme "of how people seek intimacy but don't know how to achieve it" (Gaitskill, 289) is conveyed by the author through the characters, symbolism and setting and imagery.

The house’s efficiency and helpfulness seem to make it cold and emotionless and the fact that it lives on after its inhabitants have passed just proves how the house is only a machine that is unable to love, this house will always be a house but it will never be a home.