Telling a story chronologically has the benefits of being more clear and easier for the reader to follow. Though, in some circumstances, it can help the story convey its themes and messages to tell the story in a non-chronological way. By doing so, the author can specifically choose, the important events and focus on them, or continually touches on certain occurrences to emphasize various aspects within them. Alison Bechdel in her memoir Fun Home uses a non-chronological narrative to demonstrate her way of thinking and how she continually thought of her past experiences with different perspectives as well as mimicking her live recollection of the events. This method of storytelling is effective for her memoir, as it allows the reader to step into her shoes a bit and see different possible views by repeatedly being exposed to the events she is fixated on. …show more content…
Due to the non-chronological nature of Fun Home Bechdel focuses heavily on the moment in which her father died by referring back to the event on multiple occasion through the graphic novel, usually after other important scenarios in her life.
One of which, was at the end of the novel after her coming out to her father led them to be a little closer due to their common circumstances. As she recalled these events, Bechdel could not help but think of the truck that hit her father and thought “ But in the tricky reverse narration that impels our entwined stories, he was there to catch me when I leapt” (Bechdel 232). Which alludes to how her father helped her when she came out as a lesbian even though they were not close before. She only came to this conclusion after the constant reminiscing and retailing of events, which not only led her to think of various perspectives of her own life but also the reader. If not told through present recollection, the reader may just glance over topics as being seemingly unimportant to them and miss crucial information in regards to the
themes. Bechdel’s way of narrating the story improves the effectiveness of her storytelling as it gives the readers the illusion of being told the story in person. This illusion is due to how she makes sure to point out with things could be amiss and how she seems to backtrack to various scenarios as if she currently recalling the events. Such an event can be seen when Bechdel is telling her mother about having her period and she writes “I’m only estimating that this episode took place in December, there’s no mention of it in my diary” (Bechdel 186). Due to how upfront and informal her statement is, it gives the feeling of being spoken to in person. Which enables the reader to identify with her and the story more, as otherwise, some readers may be detached from the story due to their inability to connect with it.
The first document is a political cartoon showing Miss Columbia’s School House from 1894. This cartoon is a reflects the perception of others attending Miss Columbia’s School House because inside the school everyone is misbehaving and running around. Many believe that if one country is governed by another, it is an uncivilized nation. In the cartoon there a female and a male standing outside asking can they come in. the female represents Canada and the male represents Hawaii. The male figure is holding a British flag, imply that Britain once ruled Hawaii. The female teacher who’s supposed to be taking care of the children is a representation of America. The author is portraying America as a skilled and civilized country.
Alison Bechdel wrote Fun Home as a memoir so that people understood the impact her father had on her. She went into great detail in this memoir about her childhood and moments after her father’s death. Which she claims her dad was a suicidal. During the memoir, she describes her relationship with her father. All issues, lessons, and arguments she had with her father are really significant to her. She uses her relationship with her father as the main point in the memoir. Their relationship had its ups and downs but she had very strong feelings for her father. Even though her father did not treat her as a girl most of the time, she managed to get over the fact of her father’s behavior.
Every family has secrets. Taboo secrets are typically the one's we'd like to keep hidden the most. Unfortunately, what's done in the dark always finds itself resurfacing to the light. In Allison Bechdel "Fun Home", she recollects the memories that impacted her life the most when she was in the stage of discovering her true self. The memories we remember the most tend to play a major role in our life development. For Allison, one well-kept secret that her father contained well from her, unraveled many memories of the truth that laid before her eyes.
conduct themselves distinctly. Evil and wicked people tends to hurt and harm others with no
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 between Bruce Bechdel and his family and his attempts to disguise his homosexuality by creating the image of an ideal family, themes which are prevalent throughout the rest of the nook.
The tragicomic Fun Home, by Alison Bechdel, is generally considered one of the most important pieces of the modern LGBTQ canon of literature. The graphic novel tells the story of Alison Bechdel’s attempt to find the truth about her father’s sexuality and what lead him to possibly commit suicide. Along the way, Bechdel finds her own sexuality. Bechdel’s choice to write about her and her father’s simultaneous journey to finding their sexuality was revolutionary at the time. Very few authors were writing openly about their own sexuality, and something even more revolutionary that Bechdel addressed was mental illness.
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 both Alison and her father together for the first time (221). This explains the absences of Alison’s father in her life, and the scary realization that both characters are more alike than different. The car scene must be broken into spectrums to fully analyze what is happening. The only way to understand the Alison’s feelings to observe the illustrations and expressions she uses.
In Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, Bechdel uses the theme of appearance versus reality to highlight her relationship with her father. Bechdel utilizes her illustrations and short sentences to reveal these things about herself and her father. Bechdel opens her memoir with a chapter entitled “Old Father, Old Artificer”. Bechdel refers to her father, Bruce Bechdel, as an artificer because she sees him as a skilled craftsman. Bechdel describes, “His greatest achievement, arguably, was his monomaniacal restoration of our old house.” (Bechdel 4). Her father restored their old house to make it look like a huge mansion. Bechdel knows that this is just the appearance of their household because it is not an accurate representation of their family life inside the house. Bruce created an appearance that was the opposite of reality to cover up the actual wealth of their family. He hides the fact that his family may not be as wealthy and perfect as they appear to be. In this case, Bruce reveals he believes that appearance is more important than the reality of a situation. Appearance is also important on the inside of the home as well. Bechdel mentions, “Sometimes, when things were going well, I
In Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel entitled Fun Home, the author expresses her life in a comical manner where she explains the relationship between her and her family, pointedly her father who acts as a father figure to the family as she undergoes her exhaustive search for sexuality. Furthermore, the story describes the relationship between a daughter and a father with inversed gender roles as sexuality is questioned. Throughout the novel, the author suggests that one’s identity is impacted by their environment because one’s true self is created through the ability of a person to distinguish reality from fictional despotism.
Alison Bechdel uses her graphic memoir, Fun home, to explore her relationship with her father. She uses the book as a tool to reflect on her life and the affect her father had on her. She discovers how her fathers closeted sexuality affected her childhood and her transition into adulthood. His death left a powerful mark and left her searching for answers. She clearly states this when she says, “it’s true that he didn’t kill himself until I was nearly twenty. But his absence resonated retroactively, echoing back through all the time I knew him.” (23). This feeling drove her to look back on their relationship and find what binds her so strongly to a man she never understood.
Domestic violence is a vicious cycle; one parent abuses their child, their child grows up and abuses their child, and the cycle continues until someone decides to break it. Sometimes domestic violence takes many generations before someone decides to stop the cycle. The parent who breaks the cycle wants a better life for their child than what they had. For most parents this is the ultimate goal of raising children, giving them a better world than the one you had because parents typically want the best for their children. In Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, Bruce Bechdel wants his daughter to be the opposite of him. He wants her to be a heterosexual woman but once it is clear
...and realities hidden from the reader. If the reader had been aware of everything from the beginning, there would have been no point at all to the story. Carefully revealing pieces of Miss Brill's character through this point of view illustrated her own passage into a new reality. Keeping the point of view limited to Miss Brill and excluding the thoughts of the other characters kept the reader centered on Miss Brill so that the same realizations could come about simultaneously. The reader, through masterful use of point of view, was able to share a very meaningful experience with the character and go through the same steps that she did to reach the end.
the end of the novel as both the women in his life have other men at
She hides her actions and attempt to justify them until she is expose by the letter from the paper regarding her novel entry. She is ignorant to her unrealistic judgements about Cecilia and Robert and attempts to fix the problem when she made it worse. She realizes her mistake when the letter questions the conflict of her novel and she witnesses her attempt to hide the true horror behind her decision. While she attempts at hiding her problem in the draft, she made it more noticeable to the paper and drain the luster of the plot. Her realization of her ignorance honor the lovers’ romance and made her strive to atone her former
In the first stage, the narrator is in touch with reality; she lives and exists in a state of mind known in Freudian psychology as the Ego. The Ego is defined as "the element of being that consciously and continuously enables an individual to think, feel and act." (Barnhardt, 667). The ego is based on a reality principle, in which, a person reacts in "realistic ways that will bring long term pleasure rather than pain or destruction" (Meyers, 414). The narrator's inability to cope with disagreeable thoughts such as her father's possible death is evidenced early in the novel. The narrator states: "nothing is the same, I don't know the way anymore. I slide my tongue around the ice cream, trying to concentrate on it, they put seaweed in it now, but I'm starting to shake, why is the road different, he shouldn't have allowed them to do it, I want to turn around and go back to the city and never find out what happened to him. I'll start crying, that would be horrible, none of them would know what to do and neither would I. I bite down into the cone and I can't feel anything for a minute but the knife-hard pain up the side of my face...