Alison Bechdel's Fun Home

Rebecca Anderson
Dr. Bina Freiwald
ENGL 393 // Topic 4
21 April 2014
Resisting Voices: The Retrospective Experience of Narration in Fun Home

In Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, the reader adopts a voyeuristic role in order to vicariously understand the dynamics of each panel while emphasizing the collaborative importance of images and words. Whether we watch Alison and her father Bruce sitting side by side, separated by two windows (Bechdel 86), or witness her sitting in the washroom after menstruating for the first time (168), the reader is directly engaged with the private life of Bechdel. And yet, the reader similarly encounters Alison in moments where she too acts as a voyeur as the panels show her hands holding a photograph of her young father

Alison affirms, “And in a way, you could say that my father’s end was my beginning. / Or more precisely, that the end of his lie coincided with the beginning of my truth” (117). This relational experience, of her father’s revelation before he dies as it coincides with Alison’s assertion of lesbian identity, connotes the true junction of their experience, reconciling Alison’s resistance with his own—though unproductive—method. John Shotter infers, “One must be more than a routine reproducer of [community]; one must in a real sense also play a part in its creative reproduction and sustenance as a ‘living’ tradition” (8). I suggest that the final meeting point of Bechdel’s text and Alison’s story function in relation Shotter’s theory of belonging. As the reader witnesses the development and her acknowledgement of her sexual identity as a lesbian woman, Alison effectively becomes a reproducer of this creative culture and community through the sharing of her own narrative. Vital for this ability is Alison’s concluding sentiments towards her relationship with her father. Though they chose extremely different routes in expressing their sexuality, Alison