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Alison Bechdel's Personal Identity In Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

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Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic is an autobiography written by Alison Bechdel. The graphic novel takes its readers through Alison Bechdel’s childhood using engaging diction and detailed drawings. One of the biggest themes of Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic is the discovery of one’s sexual orientation. Over the course of her life, Alison Bechdel eventually comes to the realization that she is a lesbian. Interestingly, Alison Bechdel uses this novel to recount her experience of events that helped to shape her personal identity, which resulted in a transformation of the way she sees herself. In the end, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic is a wonderful narrative that shows its readers, the complexity of personal identity, and how things like sexual orientation, love, the values of society, and politics can all play a part in the shaping of one’s character.
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic uses various concepts in order to show its readers the search Alison Bechdel embarks upon in order to discover who she is. According to an article found in the journal Developmental Psychology, “knowing who one is may be one of the most fundamental components of being human” (Galliher et al. 2011). Thus, it stands to reason that Alison Bechdel’s search for her personal identity is completely natural. Various things such as sexual orientation, love, societal values, and politics can all play a part in the shaping of one’s character. Admittedly, Bechdel uses these things in order to show her readers the
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Fun Home is a graphic novel containing both comedy and tragedy portraying the childhood of the author, Alison Bechdel. Each panel and detail in her book was carefully drawn out and created with precision. Every emotion expressed, color used, and word said was drawn in for a reason Bechdel had in mind. Making everything in her graphic novel intertwine with one another, colors match with characters and emotions mixed in with the setting. If any part were to be altered or removed, several panels would not convey the same sentiment, therefore affecting a whole chapter and consequently, the tragicomedy itself.

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It’s also her last year of high school and HSC year to add to everything else. Marchetta has created an individual representation in Josephine Alibrandi, finding her way, engaging the audience through the author’s construction of plot and teenage issues. Marchetta raises family and questions traditional ideas of what an ideal home life is. The book presents us many versions of family relationships; while are healthy (although still passionate that of Josie and Christina) the novel grasps fractured relationships.

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Alison Bechdel composed Fun Home from personal memories to depict the effects of an absence of ethical codes and values during the early stages of life. In her novel, Alison portrays her parents by outlining their personalities with criticizing descriptions, next reproducing their actions through her personal reactions- exaggerating the experience to express the process in which Alison developed a personal set of values and ethical codes. Alison Bechdel appears to describe her family’s ethical code as an idea that leans further toward the side of no code than toward the side of a one. An ethical code is an agreement with a second individual that is constructed by trust, honesty, equality, and individual rights. However, the type of ethical

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Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir, Fun Home, is more than a detailing of her early life. Rather, it is an exploration of her home life, her family relations, and of being queer in a heteronormative setting, which, in retrospect, is further complicated and sometimes overshadowed by her father’s own queerness. The use of queer time and space, concepts articulated by Judith Halberstam in A Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives, are used to vastly different ends by Alison and her father. While Alison grows into a queer setting and allows it to take root in her life, Bruce Bechdel is gradually undone by the choices he makes in relation to his secret queerness. In Fun Home, queer time and space prove to be as constructive or destructive as their occupants make it, especially in relation to Alison and Bruce.

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While reading the story, you can tell in the narrators’ tone that she feels rejected and excluded. She is not happy and I’m sure, just like her family, she wonders “why her?” She is rejected and never accepted for who she really is. She is different. She’s not like anyone else

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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

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In a sense, the play is a tragedy of the traditional society. It is a tragedy for the society represented by Torvald because that society had been confidently dealing with women in that manner which it regarded as correct and just. Now that a woman has suddenly given it a blow at almost its bases — the religion, traditional values, education, the institution of marriage, and so on — the society is facing a crisis, or a tragedy. If all the women, who are of course treated no better than this, do the same, the whole of the social system would collapse. And the impact would be basically the tragic destruction of the man's basis of happiness.

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