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Allusions In Fun Home

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In Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel, Fun Home, the author analyzes her relationship with her father and their antiparallel journeys as LGBTQ individuals, specifically through allusions to literary pieces, whose underlying themes intertwine with Bechdel’s personal story. Perhaps the most effective, relevant, and most recognizable series of allusions comes at the end of the novel when Bechdel discusses her college course on James Joyce’s Ulysses and its connections to the Odyssey by Homer. When discussing her Hobson’s choice, to take the college course or to take nothing at all, Bechdel begins with a reference to Athena, the goddess of wisdom, telling Telemachus to search for his father, Odysseus. This allusion to Homer’s epic poem parallels Bechdel’s
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Over the course of Fun Home, Bechdel characterises her Father in a series of intertextual links to Greek mythology. Her father’s persona is filtered through a triumvirate of mythological figures including, Icarus, Daedalus and the Minotaur. In the novel’s inception, Bechdel first establishes this paradigm in the form of a foreshadowing metaphor which displays the earliest of many periodic parallels that Bechdel forms between her father and Icarus. In Greek mythology, Icarus is the son of Daedalus a skilled craftsman and artificer. In the allegorical tale, Daedalus fashioned wings from feathers and wax in the hopes that he and his son would be able to escape the labyrinth.

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Chad Blenz Deniz Perin ENG 121 08 December 2014 Published in 2006, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic is a graphic memoir that brought great success to Alison Bechdel and her work. Fun Home explores the relationship between Alison and her homosexual father, Bruce Bechdel, to shed light on ideas such as gender, coming out with your sexuality, and the complex dynamics within their family. With further analysis we can see that these key ideas are facilitated through discussions of death, life, and literature–provoked by Alison’s efforts to illustrate a truthful portrait of her complicated connection with her father, specifically after he commits suicide. Alison Bechdel is not only the main author and narrator but also the main protagonist through out the graphic memoir.

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“The Odyssey.” The Norton Anthology of World Literature, Norton, 2001, pp. 225–530. Lawall, Sarah N., and Maynard Mack. “The Aeneid.”

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To Kill A Mockingbird is without question, Harper Lee’s masterpiece, and is what we will remember the author for, long after her passing. To Kill A Mockingbird analyzes the illogicality of the adult mindset towards race and class, through the young eyes of Scout Finch. Set in the Deep South of the 1930, the novel is very relevant to the political racial views of the time, and is actually loosely based on Harper Lee’s own life. The book is set in Maycomb, an old, tired town in the Deep South, U.S.A. and as expected, racial and prejudicial views are very prevalent in the small, and mainly old community.

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