Putting The “Fun” In “Funeral”
There’s a lot to be said in support for the coming-of-age narrative. As many do, they have first-person narrators, an arresting technique - the reader “comes along” with the narrator. The story is an oral tale, and we are listening as they speak. It is hard to discern who the narrator is in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home. In many English classes, one is asked to never assume the writer and speaker are the same, but with a character named after the author, as well as author information that calls Bechdel an “archivist of her own life” it is safe to assume that this is the true life story of Bechdel.
Image courety Houghton Mifflin
Fun Home is the story of Bechdel’s father, a gay man living precariously in the closet, who she believes killed himself by jumping in front of a truck. The story shifts also to talk about Bechdel herself, from her coming out as a lesbian to her OCD childhood ticks. Family vacations and early work become the playground for Bechdel’s story, and we are moved through time, so instead of one big story about her sexuality and her father’s death, the narrative is compartmentalized to focus on specific aspects of her life.
The most fascinating aspect of Fun Home for me was Bechdel’s relation to fiction and reality. Throughout the text, she compares parts of her life to famous literature, and even brings in Wind in the Willows and The Addams Family. What is astounding about this project is how she is able to look back on her life as though it were a novel, and analyzing the “characters” of her “story”, she can make meaningful connections and observations with them. Read the rest of this entry »
