Fun Home Essays

Fun home is a graphic memoir by Alison Bechdel that is focused on her and her parents especially her father. Alison’s parents Helen and Bruce play a major role in her novel and in her life in general Alison lives in Pennsylvania with Bruce Helen, and her little brothers Christian and John. Early on, Bechdel provides background of her childhood in rural Pennsylvania with her parents. Her father who is more concerned with decorating than he is with his family, “Hand wash these curtains so we can put

The graphic novel titled “Fun Home’ by Alison Bechdel is an autobiography that follows Alison’s life growing up along with her family and shows us her personal struggles. Alison goes through a lot in the book, including coming to terms with being a lesbian, trying to understand her gender identity, dealing with the death of her father, and living in a house and being part of a family that is falling apart because it was built on a lie. This graphic novel focuses on Alison and her father, Bruce, and

Ideal and Reality Everyone has an idea of an ideal world, particularly children. When children grow up, they start to realize that the reality is different from their ideal world. While children go through the adolescent stage, they will act differently than normal and have to handle huge changes both mentally and physically. This is demonstrated by the main character Holden Caulfield, in the Catcher in the Rye by J.D Salinger. Holden Caulfield, a sixteen year old boy, grows up and he realizes that

The market is saturated with memoirs written in prose. Alison Bechdel, however, puts a spin on the dysfunctional family memoir in her graphic novel Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. By using the graphic novel narrative form, Bechdel tells the tale of her family tragedy through words and graphic images. Fun Home tells the story of young Alison’s life of dysfunction with a father who is a closeted gay man, a family that lives in isolation and her own struggle with anxiety and OCD. The chapter “The Canary-Colored

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

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

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

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

In her graphic memoir, Fun Home, Alison Bechdel considers a broad range of topics such as her open lesbian identity in relation to her father’s closeted gay identity, her parents’ tumultuous relationship, and the harsh reality of some of her fondest childhood memories. Her lack of information about her mother, Helen, communicates her distant relationship with someone who is supposed to surpass the love, care, and affection of anyone that is related to her. Helen’s involvement in the community theater

People’s Reactions to Fun Home The issue of morality or ethics, in general, has long been controversial. The various parties are yet to agree on a particular standard to be used in the evaluation of people’s actions—when is someone right or wrong, or what even is right or wrong? While some claim that the motives behind an act determine the wrongness or rightness of the action, others believe the religious or judicial soundness is a better determinant. This equivocality of ethics is evident in overwhelming

In her graphic memoir Fun Home, Allison Bechdel puts forth the experience of shared homosexuality as the major connection that binds her to her father, concluding her meandering analysis of the man and his relationship to her with a chapter centered around an episode in which they both acknowledge their queerness. This connection is absolutely a valid one. However, in framing this episode as the culminating event in the father/daughter relationship Fun Home portrays, Bechdel fails to offer overt

Fun Home is an autobiography encompassing Alison Bechdel and her father’s sexuality through their struggled relationship. Throughout the story, Bechdel refers back to her childhood memories and incorporates the hindsight ideas she continually made while growing up. The use of comic images creates a deeper context of the author’s viewpoint for each scene which helps exemplify the themes of sexuality, literature, and exploration. Bechdel contrasts the opposing gender roles to the sexual similarities

Maus and Fun Home both use the medium of comics to tell very personal and delicate stories. Art Spiegelman uses Maus to tell the moving and emotional story of his father’s survival of the Holocaust; Alison Bechdel uses Fun Home to tell the story of her father’s death and the exploration of her identity. Although both texts are different in many ways, the both use the comic medium to portray an outsider experience. While Spiegelman uses the medium to construct an animal hierarchy and Bechdel uses

The memoir "Fun Home" by Alison Bechdel, is the author's journey of self-discovery and coming-of-age. Throughout the memior, Bechdel reffelcts on her own life experiences and uses her home business as a metaphor for the complexities of human relationships and the passage of time. The author explores the nature of love, loss, and grief, as well as the challenges of growing up in a family and community with minimal cultural exchange. Through bechdels personal story, she invited readers to consider

beliefs. The students at Duke University refusing to read Alison Bechdel’s autobiography Fun Home are misguided. Ibanca Anand, a student at Duke University states, when asked about the autobiography that, “It has the potential to start many arguments and conversations, which, in my opinion, is an integral component of a liberal arts education.”(“Fun Home Picked for Class of 2019 Summer Reading”) In choosing Fun Home as a reading selection, Duke University’s intentions were just to give incoming students

masculinity, or lack there of, in “Fun Home”. His level of femininity is greater than his masculinity, for example his compulsion to perfect everything around their home. Bechdel 's compares herself to her father in that “I was Spartan to my father’s Athenian, modern to his victorian, butch to his nelly, utilitarian to hsi aesthete” (Bechdel 15). She takes on the male appearance through her roughness and her carelessness for aesthetics, and t is clear that in Bechdel’s “Fun Home,” masculinity is a recurring

In the graphic novel Fun Home, author Alison Bechdel recounts memories of her childhood, while contemplating lies and deception of her father and how his life impacted her own sexual orientation. Late in the novel, Bechdel details the afternoon during which she realized she was a lesbian, coincidentally coinciding with the day she signed up to take a class about her father’s favorite novel of all time. Bechdel draws herself in a bookstore, reading a copy of Word is Out, and placed in the frame with

In Allison Bechdel’s Fun Home, Bruce Bechdel’s home restoration efforts are a recurring theme, and the details of his actions do not go unnoticed by young Allison. While he is obsessed with perfection, he cannot break the belief in his daughter’s mind that his actions are tainted, that there is a darker secret behind his drive. Understanding Bruce’s homosexuality and femininity gives light to the source of his obsession with restoration, and the truth of his daughter’s supposition. Bruce’s laborious

In this chapter of Fun Home, gender identity is a prominent theme that Alison explores. Ten-year-old Alison begins to recognize that she desires to be more masculine then Bruce wants her to be. Bruce is constantly on Alison about keeping a barrette in her bangs because “it keeps the hair out of your eyes”, to which Alison replies, “So would a crewcut” (96). The reader can see on page 99 as Alison gets to be a little older, her father tries to get her to wear pearls. When she tells her father that

I think your analysis of one panel in the Fun Home suggests that this single image present an especial family relationship that each member of this family only cares about his or her own interest. They also don’t try to form a family connection, and such characterizations come from the parents’ atypical dynamic. Your paper really stands out in every sense. I enjoy your overall claim that these people are all self-interested that they overlook the need to interact and connect their family as a whole