Allusions In Fun Home

Alison Bechdel’s memoir, Fun Home, is a compelling narrative in which Bechdel takes the reader through her life and gives insight into her relationship and the complex lifestyle her closeted homosexual father, Bruce Bechdel. However, her serious topic is told through the narrative of comics, images that literally put the readers into the moments of her life with her. Even though, the graphic images provide visual insight, Bechdel makes a conscious decision to include a multitude of literary allusions because, as Bechdel describes, “I employ these allusions to James and Fitzgerald not only as descriptive devices, but because my parent’s are most real to me in fictional terms.” (Bechdel, Page 67) Her continued use of literary allusions can be

To an outside observer, the life and tales of James Gatz and Bruce Bechdel have an air of similarity; while Bruce is not a bootlegger, “sell-willed metamorphosis from farm boy to prince” (Bechdel, 63) add to the idea of the metamorphosis. The process Bruce went through to try to change his identity into a completely different one is similar to the one of James Gatz to Jay Gatsby. His construction of success lived in his house: a home that was impeccable maintained and decorated with a garden that was regularly well-kept. A book collection that was vast, but yet suffocating under this illusion he had created. Bechdel describes the house as, “…our house was not a real home at all but the simulacrum of one, a museum” (Page 17) It was an image that Bruce created to represent an identity, he fabricated not owned. On the other hand, James Gatsby’s goal was to finally see his long lost love, Daisy Buchanan to which he threw lavish parties in a big, highly decorated home. In contrast, Bruce Bechdel’s end goal was more to just make it through. Being raised in 1930 and 1940s America, the idea of traditional, heterosexual marriages, and relationships were synonymous with stable, acceptable, and the repression of homosexuality was probably consciously or subconsciously in his thoughts. However, Bruce’s life was starkly

Alison Bechdel as a child probably had no suspicion that her father was living a dual life. Alison takes advantage of this memoir to connect parts of her memories to the complex illusion Bruce Bechdel lived, she did this through a connection of literature. Through Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband, Bechdel illustrates how Bruce looked to people who didn’t know his secret and even to further illustrate how she saw him until a certain point in time. Then Bechdel furthered our insight using F. Scott Fitzgerald’s, The Great Gatsby to provide more about the lengths a man will go through to recreate themselves to fit society’s standards. I think it’s important to point out that Alison Bechdel consciously picked these literary devices, that she’s not just a pretentious writer effortlessly connecting every little moment for a well renown writer. Instead, Bechdel consciously chooses the work of Fitzgerald and Wilde to demonstrate the point, that her father was a complex individual whom she thought she knew for many years, but it turns out she was missing a huge chunk of his identity. I believe that is why Alison Bechdel has literary allusions skewed from page to page, because her parents,