Symbolism In Fun Home

The market is saturated with memoirs written in prose. Alison Bechdel, however, puts a spin on the dysfunctional family memoir in her graphic novel Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. By using the graphic novel narrative form, Bechdel tells the tale of her family tragedy through words and graphic images. Fun Home tells the story of young Alison’s life of dysfunction with a father who is a closeted gay man, a family that lives in isolation and her own struggle with anxiety and OCD. The chapter “The Canary-Colored Caravan of Death” focuses on her father’s death by suicide, and her own isolation and mental struggles. Much of Bechdel’s images in the graphic novel reference lightness and darkness; and she is able to use shading to continue the symbolism of light and dark that composed her life. Although her use of the graphic novel in some ways provides comic relief to her story, Bechdel's contrast between dark and light shading and language convey the tragedy of a family's emotional scarring and pain following years of dysfunction.

Even though Alison

There are several panels where young Alison is watching the sun rises over Bald Eagle Mountain. On page 128 Bechdel discusses the irony of the “crystal clear” creek water that looks beautiful “precisely because it was polluted.” This creek can be seen as a metaphor representing the entire Bechdel family and how they might even be, “too acidic to support life of any kind.” In the first panel on page 129, the graphic weight of Alison’s shadow in the “fishless creek” makes her appear flat and dark as she thinks of a line from her mom’s favorite poem, “Death is the mother of beauty.” The language and the shading in these two panels reveal the contrast of life and death and the tragedy behind Bechdel’s story. As a result of the graphic weight added to these two panels, the reader is able to understand how darkness overtook Bechdel’s