Allusions In Fun Home

Many people have difficult relationships with family members but few are as explicit and ironic as Alison Bechdel’s relationship with her father. In her memoir Fun Home, Alison writes of how her homosexual father, in an effort to hide his sexuality, diverts attention from his family to his reputation. Alison Bechdel explains how her father’s obsession with perfection failed their father-daughter relationship using her experiences with literature, visual representation where words fail her and thoughtful reflection on her father’s shortcomings. Her using these literary methods to describe her father show the reader how she has overcome her upbringing and brought clarity to herself after her father’s death and how others can do the same. Fiction gives readers the ability to connect with characters as they develop and grow throughout their story. By reading along with fictional characters in literature, readers can identify with similar life realizations and reflect on those shared experiences. In writing, authors take advantage of allusions because it can grasp the attention of their audience and enhance the meaning of a story. For instance, in the memoir Fun Home, Alison Bechdel utilizes allusions of her

In her earlier years, she reminisces on Bruce’s expectations for the perfect family and “museum-like” house where he “treated his furniture like children and his children like furniture” (Bechdel 14). By connecting Bruce with other skillful artiface fictional characters, Alison is able to put forward an explanation as to why he was the way he was and Lydenburg addresses this realization by stating, “She does not reject entirely Bruce’s ‘He is me’ mode of reading, but she does see its limitations, and even the dangers of ‘overidentification’” (pg. 141). Recognizing Bruce’s overidentification tendencies helped her accept his flaws as an unexpressive, preoccupied