Bruce Bechdel In The Great Gatsby

The existence of trust is arguably the paramount aspect of having a successful relationship. It comes as no surprise, then, that the relationships that Bruce Bechdel and Jay Gatsby attempt to seek are flawed at their very core. Whether readers are tempted with sympathy for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Gatsby or not, Gatsby is a liar, and shameless in his acts. In Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, it is the same that goes for Bruce, Bechdel’s father. Bruce is also difficult to take seriously, emotionally exhausted and also a liar, though not shameless. Jay Gatsby and Bruce Bechdel share the fact that they are both very secretive, complex men. The “suspension of the imaginary in the real” (65) is the way that the two cope with their difficulties and troubles, and is the most severe commonality that they share. They both attempt to make ties with people in their lives, but these ties are tenuous at best. “Perhaps affectation can be so thoroughgoing,” writes Bechdel,

While Jay Gatsby had an astounding lack of friends, Bruce Bechdel has an absence of a loving family. Through his deceit with his wife, rage fueled fights and cold atmosphere it has a huge impact on their children’s lives. This unhappiness that manifested itself in Bruce, and showed itself as a cold exterior and a menacing presence in their house. One question arises from both Gatsby and Bruce Bechdel: how is it, that the both of these two men were able to so thoroughly and absolutely deceive themselves. These are two stories of two emotionally absent men, and their astoundingly elaborate and fully operational illusions of a life, the hurtful effects that these chimeras had on the people that surrounded them, and their struggle with a tenuous grasp of reality that they fight to maintain underneath the veil of their counterfeit