Analysis Of Alison Bechdel's Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

980 Words2 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Essay on fun home by alison bechdel

Alison Bechdel 's "Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic" is an exciting autobiography with comics that bring her story to life. Alison Bechdel wrote this book about her childhood, the relationship she had with her father and one of the many things they shared in common, their sexuality. In addition to their common homosexuality, Alison and Bruce Bechdel share o b sessive compulsive tendencies and their artistic ways, even using her artistic language to describe the father daughter relationship they had, "I was Spartan to my father 's Athenian. Modern to his Victorian. Butch to his nelly. Utilitarian to his aesthete." This opposition was a source of tension in their relationship, as both tried to express their dissatisfaction with their given gender …show more content…

Four moths prior to his death, she came out to her parents that she was in fact a lesbian, she writes, "If I had not felt compelled to share my little sexual secret, perhaps the semi would have passed without incident." This statement shows a hidden connection between father and daughter before the actual relationship beings. Her mother also shared the news while Alison was away at college about her husband 's affairs with men and interest in young boys, for example "more promising high school students." - the muscular, male ones, it seems - to visit his home to borrow copies of great American novels like "The Sun Also Rises" and "The Great Gatsby." Last but not least, two weeks before his passing, his wife asked for a …show more content…

Since the reader is directly responsible for interpreting "action" in a comic, he or she is more directly engaged on a far more personal level. Fun Home is one such example of a graphic novel making use of comics as a means of opening a discourse about the scars family members leave on their children and finding some form of connections and closure through sharing these stories with others. This novel really shows how comics are moving in new directions and demonstrates a willingness to engage readers in new and challenging ways. Each image seems to give a very specific emotion that is carried throughout her story and the pictures contain elements of beauty, longing, memories, and

Show More
Related

  • Finding Her Father In Alison Bechdel's Fun Home

    1505 Words  | 4 Pages

    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.

    Read More

  • Analysis Of Fun Home By Allison Bechdel

    722 Words  | 2 Pages

    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.

    Read More

  • "Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic" Analysis

    2233 Words  | 5 Pages

    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.

    Read More

  • Kids'stuff Michael Chaubon Analysis

    781 Words  | 2 Pages

    In the essay “Kids’ Stuff” Michael Chabon argues that comic books have become too centered around adults and need to be more focused on youth readers like they were during his childhood. Chabon claims that the authors goal audience has changed over the years.Comics that were once written for children are now written to appeal to adults. Throughout the essay, Chabon disagrees with the authors choice to aim comics toward adults instead of children. He feels that authors should write children stories for children.

    Read More

  • Similarities Between Artifice And Art In Alison Bechdel's Fun Home

    1010 Words  | 3 Pages

    Throughout chapter one of Fun Home, Alison Bechdel portrays artifice and art as two very similar but distinct things; both overlapping and making it hard to differentiate between what is what. Art, in her view, is the truth, and a skill that has to be mastered. On the other hand, artifice contains partial, or full, amounts of falsehood; it covers up the truth in some way but contains art in itself. Artifice can be, like art, something mastered, but can also be a coping mechanism to cover up something good or bad. Bechdel turns both art and artifice into a very interlinked, combined, version of the two forms. When truth and falsehood are combined, after awhile, it becomes a challenge to distinguish between the two; evidently true to herself.

    Read More

  • The Theme Of Appearance Versus Reality In Fun Home By Alison Bechdel

    1346 Words  | 3 Pages

    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

    Read More

  • Comparison Of Alison Bechdel's Fun Home And The Great Gatsby

    792 Words  | 2 Pages

    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.

    Read More

  • Fun Home Alison Bechdel Analysis

    1389 Words  | 3 Pages

    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.

    Read More

  • Ahab and Una's Incestuous Relationship in Naslund's Novel, Ahab's Wife

    1066 Words  | 3 Pages

    The incestuous nature of story telling which is featured in Ahab's wife is reminiscent of the Anne Sexton's poem, Briar Rose. Una is in a constant search for sustenance. Her mind as cannot exist without the hope of learning and engulfing knowledge. As a child, it was the occupation of her father to appease her insatiable appetite. This was done with stories and the boundless possibilities she was allowed to find within the recesses of her mind. As time progresses and Una grew, her father started to question the conclusions and presumptions that these internal scavenger hunts were building within her.

    Read More

  • Mothers and Daughters in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club

    1798 Words  | 4 Pages

    Throughout Amy Tan’s novel, The Joy Luck Club, the reader can see the difficulites in the mother-daughter relationships.  The mothers came to America from China hoping to give their daughters better lives than what they had.  In China, women were “to be obedient, to honor one’s parents, one’s husband, and to try to please him and his family,” (Chinese-American Women in American Culture).  They were not expected to have their own will and to make their own way through life.  These mothers did not want this for their children so they thought that in America “nobody [would] say her worth [was] measured by the loudness of her husband’s belch…nobody [would] look down on her…” (3).  To represent everything that was hoped for in their daughters, the mothers wanted them to have a “swan- a creature that became more than what was hoped for,” (3).  This swan was all of the mothers’ good intentions.  However, when they got to America, the swan was taken away and all she had left was one feather.

    Read More

  • Sexual Self-Discovery in Fun Home by Allison Bechdel

    1178 Words  | 3 Pages

    ...within her household. Within her own household, Alison was uncomfortable of being herself; in fact, at times she felt that she almost had no say in the selecting items such as clothes. This was also quite complex when it came to her subjectivity as well. Instances such as the time Bruce wanted Alison to wear a particular dress to a wedding, or when he insisted for her to were a particular set of pearls, would play a pivotal role in her sexual self development. Other factors such as her relationship with her girlfriend and the news she would find out following her fathers death seemed to also play an important part. Alison Bechdel’s battle in her sexual self-development was one full of anguish and pain because of all of its complexities but she now presents the confidence in herself and her sexuality to present in her eloquent and impactful graphic novel, Fun Home.

    Read More

  • A Comaprison of the Miller's Tale and Merchant's Tale

    779 Words  | 2 Pages

    Alison is described as young and wild. She is like an animal: " Thereto she koude skippe and make game/ As any kyde or calf folwynge his dame" (I. 3259-60). We know that she would be willing to go along with any idea as long as it is "fun". We can see her childish immaturity in the scenes where she lets Absalom "kiss" her. We do not learn the details of her marriage such as her feeling toward John, her husband. We simply know that it is a mis-matched marriage with a large age gap between them.

    Read More

  • Attitudes of Marriage in Chaucers the Canterbury Tales

    1523 Words  | 4 Pages

    On the contrary, Alison’s husband loved her more than his own life, although he felt foolish for marrying her since she was so young and skittish. This, in turn, led him to keep a close watch on her whenever possible. The Miller’s main point in his story is that if a man obtains what he wants from God or from his wife, he won’t ask questions or become jealous.

    Read More

  • Old Father Old Artificer Essay

    966 Words  | 2 Pages

    In chapter one, “Old Father, Old Artificer”, of her graphic novel Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, the young Bechdel generated her identity through the tensions and mysteries that engulfed her family the home. Masculinity, physical strength and a modern outlook were her personality traits as she grew, becoming the “Butch to [her father’s] Nelly” (269) and his opposite in several aspects. A conscious effort was made on her part to set her own pace from what her father expected of her. He was a strong, influential figure within her life. Expressing emotions towards her father was strictly not allowed in the home. Bechdel was left “rushing from the room in embarrassment” (273) on the one unforgettable occasion that she went to kiss him goodnight. She...

    Read More

  • Graphic Novels Essay

    902 Words  | 2 Pages

    Most people believe that graphic novels are just an art book with minimal text. They believe it is just for entertainment for kids or young adults. They think that graphic novels are just like comics. But to get to the point, graphic novels are just like all the other novels. They are a piece of literature that tells a story and pulls out the reader’s imagination, so that they feel that they are a part of the story or can even relate to the story. Graphic novels have changed and developed into such remarkable pieces of literature and should be accepted by all scholars to be placed in that category. According to John Ridley, “There are still some people out there who believe comic books are nothing more than, well, comic books. But the true cognoscenti know graphic novels are-at their best-an amazing blend of art, literature and the theater of the mind”.

    Read More

More about Analysis Of Alison Bechdel's Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

Open Document