Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic Essay

Alison Bechdels Fun shoes A Family Tragicomic is an arouse autobiography with comics that bring her story to life. Alison Bechdel wrote this book around her childhood, the relationship she had with her flummox and one of the many an(prenominal) things they shared in general, their gender. In addition to their common homosexuality, Alison and Bruce Bechdel share o b sessive compulsive tendencies and their artistic ways, even victimization her artistic language to describe the father young woman relationship they had, I was Spartan to my fathers Athenian. Modern to his Victorian.Butch to his nelly. Utilitarian to his aesthete. This resister was a source of tension in their relationship, as both time-tested to fetch their dissatisf consummation with their given gender roles Not only were we inverts, we were inversions of each other(a). bandage I was trying to compensate for something unmanly in him, he was attempting to express something feminine through me. It was a war of cross-purposes, and so doomed to perpetual escalation.At the center of where it all begins at Fun Home, Alison helps us insure her desperate need to make a connection with her father, Bruce Allen Bechdel. Father and daughter are playing a game of airplane that ends around as soon as it begins because of her fathers obsession with keeping his old Victorian put up he personally restored clean and what he seems to always want unplowed in perfect condition. Bruce could spin garbage into gold and cultivate the compli mentary yard into a lush flowering landscape. He treated his furniture like children, and his children like furniture. Alison makes it clear by telling her story and drawings that he was so emotionally distant, that even forward his death, she ached as if he were already gone.Before Bruces death, he and his daughter have a chat in which Bruce confesses some of his sexual history this is presented as a partial(p) resolution to the conflict between father and daughte r. Alison along with the rest of her siblings didnt have the typical dramatic and sad reaction other tidy sum would express if there own father passed. Instead she describes it as tearless and sheepish, my brothers and I looked for as long as we sensed it was appropriate. If only they make smelling salts to induce grief-stricken swoons, rather than snap you out of them.Although Bruces death was assumed to be an accident, it was also a tragedy that started a long time in the first place his life had even began which is why many readers, or even Alison suspect suicide because of the evidence Bechdel reveals to the reader. Four moths former to his death, she came out to her parents that she was in fact a lesbian, she writes, If I had non mat up compelled to share my little sexual secret, perhaps the semi would have passed without incident. This command shows a hidden connection between father and daughter before the actual relationship beings.Her mother also shared the news age Alison was away at college close her husbands affairs with men and interest in young boys, for example more promising senior high school 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 divorce.Although these series of events that led up to Bruces death may seem very tragic, it allowed Alison to tell not just a story about herself but her fathers struggle to permit his secret out as well. One of the most important mainstay points in Alison Bechdels memoir is the connection both her and Bruce shared was expressing their sexuality through literature which plays a important role in Alisons self discovery.She writes My realization at 19 that I was a lesbian came about in a manner consistent with my bookish upbringing, Alison chose to carry the fact and not hide from the issue, taking a female attendant and going to gay union meetings, she was open about her sexuality before shed even been in a homosexual relationship. Herfather, on the other hand, had had countless affairs with men but wasnt open about it . This may be due to him being afraid of coming out, as the images show the fear in his eyes when the conversation topic almost ends up being about homosexuality.Alison Bechdel introduces her readers to many copied by hand family photographs, letters, local anaesthetic maps and excerpts from her own childhood journal, incorporating these images into her narrative. Since the reader is directly responsible for interpreting action in a comic, he or she is more directly intermeshed on a far more personal level.Fun Home is one such example of a graphic novel make use of comics as a means of opening a talk over about the scars family members leave on their children and finding some form of connections and stop 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(prenominal) image seems to give a very specific emotion that is carried passim her story and the pictures contain elements of beauty, longing, memories, and hope.The bittersweet relationship of parent and child is held again and again in Fun Home. The memoir ends with two images that portray the cock-a-hoop times and the good. The top half of the final page shows the truck about to strike the bottom half shows daughter, in jumping into a pool, delay to be caught in her fathers arms. The bonding of the two images is cause and striking. They also offer reader and author a choice give notice what was had or continue to yearn. In completing Fun Home Alison Bechdel may have finally ended her longing.