Visual And Literary Techniques In Alison Bechdel's Fun Home

Alison Bechdel’s memoir Fun Home is a masterfully crafted piece. In comparison to the other memoirs we have read for this course, Fun Home is definitely, for me, the most intriguing and immersive of the three. Bechdel manages to develop an engaging and thought-provoking piece about trying to understand the people that we are close to and discovering who we, as individuals, are in relation to them. Fun Home is a story that is very specific to Bechdel’s life, but there is a universality to it since we have all been in families and we have all been mysteries to one another. Figuring out those mysteries and finding a way through life via those relationships is the true purpose of this narrative. Bechdel accomplishes this well crafted memoir with

it’s universal message by drawing upon and exemplifying the parallelism between herself and her father to comprehensively and powerfully depict the complex nature of their relationship.
Bechdel weaves together such a strong and engaging narrative about understanding important familial relationships by illustrating, both figuratively and literally, the parallels between herself and her father.

To discover herself in relation to her father, Bechdel uses both visual and literary techniques. To visually depict the parallels of herself and her father Bechdel draws cells in which she and her father are engaged in related activities, but are separated. One such example is that of the bottom cell on page 86 in which young Bechdel and her father are both engaging in literary pursuits; her writing a check so as to buy some comic books with which to satisfy her ravenous literary hunger and her father reading a biography of Zelda Fitzgerald. In the scenario they are physically separated by the vast space between where they are sitting in the study. Bechdel also draws this cell from the perspective of being outside the house looking in through two windows which illustrates them being visually separated by the wall between the two windows with which we view her and her father. This scene illustrates the complex nature of Bechdel’s relationship with her father, as they are both very similar but ultimately separated by a gap which they cannot seem to

bridge.
As well as visually depicting the parallelism and complexities of her relationship with her father, Bechdel utilizes her captions to illustrate these parallels.

On page 99 Bechdel shows her and her father’s similar interest in masculine beauty through her captions, “Between us lay a slender demilitarized zone—our shared reverence for masculine beauty,” and “But I wanted the muscles and tweed like my father wanted the velvet and pearls—subjectively, for myself” (pg. 99). Through these captions Bechdel once again illustrates a parallel between her and her father, as they both enjoy masculine beauty. However, they are once again separated by a divide created by the fact that they don’t enjoy it in the same fashion. While her father enjoys masculine beauty in other men, Bechdel wants to enjoy masculine beauty by embracing it as part of who she is. These two quotes also serve to allude to the parallel of both Bechdel and her father’s homosexuality while also implying the difference between how they go about dealing with it. While Bechdel wants to embrace her homosexuality and express herself accordingly, her father strives to impose his feelings of femininity on her instead of acting on them himself. While her father projects onto others, Bechdel acts upon her feelings illustrating once again that both she and her father are similar beings, however they are also separated by a gap created by them not acting in the same

fashion.
While the specifics of Bechdel’s narrative do not relate to my life, her relationship with her father and examination of said relationship are similar to what I want to convey in my memoir. After I had my meeting with you about my memoir I decided to take your advice and explore my relationship not only with my friend Meg but also that with my parents. As you noticed by my visceral reaction when you asked me about my parents, we have a complicated relationship to say the least. While I have been thinking about my piece and therefore my relationships with my parents I have begun to realize that, like Bechdel, I am similar to my parents, however there is also this divide that for some reason we cannot cross. Before reading Fun Home I had been struggling with conveying these complexities to the reader of my piece but Bechdel’s memoir gave me inspiration and new ideas. What I am going to take away from Fun Home is Bechdel’s technique of drawing parallels between herself and her father through choosing situations that illustrate how similar but distant they were. In my own piece I am going to select memories that illustrate the similarities as well as distance between myself and my parents. I am going to use specific parallels like Bechdel does to illustrate my relationship with my parents and convey its complexities.
In Fun Home Bechdel creates a compelling narrative that explores the theme of our relationships with others and our own identities in regards to them. To do this she creates parallelism between herself and her father. In my own memoir piece, I aspire to create this same parallelism to explore and explain my own complex relationships with my parents. Much of the time Bechdel employs her illustrations to depict these parallels and, while I am obviously not illustrating a memoir, I can still create similar parallels through my prose by subtly alluding to the similarities between myself and my parents as well as implying the space created by these parallels that contributes to the distance in our relationship.