Many of the works have proven to show how the representation is different from the truth or reality. Native Guard, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, and Fun Home all contain this idea. The author uses their representation to reveal the reality of a situation. Natasha Trethewey uses poems to convery her thoughts, Brugel uses imagery, and Bechdel uses a comic book to reveal the truth behind their representations. In a specific poem, Trethewey discusses how on the outside anything can look beautiful, but after examining deeper things can actually turn out to be worse. Bruegel uses his painting to describe how society appears to be, but actually is. Bechdel uses the idea of “artifice” and reality to reveal the truth about her father. In …show more content…
Through this idea, Trethewey explains how this photograph looks beautiful on the outside, but actually reminds her of all the suffering that happened inside during the storm. The photograph only captures the surface level, while below it is other problems. The ugly parts are hidden behind the beauty to attempt to hide it from others. Trethewey describes the storm that forces her family into the house for days, then moves to describe all the damage the storm has done outside and to her family. A couple lines that truly stand out are, “why on the back has someone made a list / of our names, the date, the event: nothing / of what’s inside – mother, stepfather’s fist?” (Trethewey). Through these lines, Trethewey reveals the abuse that happened in her home during the ice storm. The photograph captures …show more content…
Appearance versus reality played a major role in the relationship between Bechdel and her father. When Bechdel goes to college and realizes that she is a lesbian, she decides to live with her true sexuality. While speaking to her mother about her own sexuality, Bechdel finds out her father is gay and has had many affairs with men. Bechdel is upset that her father never decided to live and accept his reality. Bechdel believes her and her father might be able to find a way to connect around their homosexuality and develop a better relationship. Instead, Bechdel’s father chooses to live behind appearance to hide the truth and be accepted by society. From her father’s appearance, no one ever truly knows the truth about her family and their lives. As a result of Bechdel’s father not coming out, it builds a barrier between him and Alison. Bechdel calls her father an artificer because he has carefully crafted his whole life, which is a complete lie. Her father has been hiding his identity so no one knows it was there. Appearance hinders the possibility of developing a cohesive relationship between Bechdel and her father. Bechdel views the relationship between “artifice” and reality as negative because “artifice” hid the reality the would have allowed herself a better relationship and life with her father. She blames the idea of “artifice” for not allowing her to have a good relationship with her
Authors use many different types of imagery in order to better portray their point of view to a reader. This imagery can depict many different things and often enhances the reader’s ability to picture what is occurring in a literary work, and therefore is more able to connect to the writing. An example of imagery used to enhance the quality of a story can be found in Leyvik Yehoash’s poem “Lynching.” In this poem, the imagery that repeatably appears is related to the body of the person who was lynched, and the various ways to describe different parts of his person. The repetition of these description serves as a textual echo, and the variation in description over the course of the poem helps to portray the events that occurred and their importance from the author to the reader. The repeated anatomic imagery and vivid description of various body parts is a textual echo used by Leyvik Yehoash and helps make his poem more powerful and effective for the reader and expand on its message about the hardship for African Americans living
His outside actions of touching the wall and looking at all the names are causing him to react internally. He is remembering the past and is attempting to suppress the emotions that are rising within him. The first two lines of the poem set the mood of fear and gloom which is constant throughout the remainder of the poem. The word choice of "black" to describe the speaker's face can convey several messages (502). The most obvious meaning ... ...
On page 113 she tells her brother to call her a man's name instead of her name so that she could fit in as a boy, not a girl. “Call me Albert instead of Alison” (Bechdel 113). Whenever her brothers were looking at a naked women calendar Alison had the curiosity and need to look at it. That may have helped her realize that she was actually interested in women, not men. When she left for college she started to experience and putting in place her sexual orientation. She got a girlfriend which actually supported her during hard times in her life like her father’s
“ The horizon was the color of milk. Cold and fresh. Poured out among the bodies” (Zusak 175). The device is used in the evidence of the quote by using descriptives words that create a mental image. The text gives the reader that opportunity to use their senses when reading the story. “Somehow, between the sadness and loss, Max Vandenburg, who was now a teenager with hard hands, blackened eyes, and a sore tooth, was also a little disappointed” (Zusak 188). This quote demonstrates how the author uses descriptive words to create a mental image which gives the text more of an appeal to the reader's sense such as vision. “She could see his face now, in the tired light. His mouth was open and his skin was the color of eggshells. Whisker coated his jaw and chin, and his ears were hard and flat. He had a small but misshapen nose” (Zusak 201). The quotes allows the reader to visualize what the characters facial features looked like through the use of descriptive words. Imagery helps bring the story to life and to make the text more exciting. The reader's senses can be used to determine the observations that the author is making about its characters. The literary device changes the text by letting the reader interact with the text by using their observation skills. The author is using imagery by creating images that engages the reader to know exactly what's going on in the story which allows them to
Throughout chapter one of Fun Home, Alison Bechdel portrays artifice and art as two very similar but distinct things; both overlapping and making it hard to differentiate between what is what. Art, in her view, is the truth, and a skill that has to be mastered. On the other hand, artifice contains partial, or full, amounts of falsehood; it covers up the truth in some way but contains art in itself. Artifice can be, like art, something mastered, but can also be a coping mechanism to cover up something good or bad. Bechdel turns both art and artifice into a very interlinked, combined, version of the two forms. When truth and falsehood are combined, after awhile, it becomes a challenge to distinguish between the two; evidently true to herself.
In chapter one, “Old Father, Old Artificer”, of her graphic novel Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, the young Bechdel generated her identity through the tensions and mysteries that engulfed her family the home. Masculinity, physical strength and a modern outlook were her personality traits as she grew, becoming the “Butch to [her father’s] Nelly” (269) and his opposite in several aspects. A conscious effort was made on her part to set her own pace from what her father expected of her. He was a strong, influential figure within her life. Expressing emotions towards her father was strictly not allowed in the home. Bechdel was left “rushing from the room in embarrassment” (273) on the one unforgettable occasion that she went to kiss him goodnight. She...
In her novel, Bechdel’s complex sexual self-development is a powerful struggle for her to figure out and acknowledge her sexual orientation. One can simply observe the pain and struggle Bechdel encountered in his process of self-development especially in one of her monologues when she discusses the impact of finding out about her father’s homosexual ways in his past. She states, “Only four months earlier (to her fathers suicide), I had made an announcement to my parents, ‘I am a lesbian’ but it was a hypothesis so thorough and convincing that I saw no reason not to share it immediately… My homosexuality remained at that point purely theoretical, untested hypothesis” (Bechdel 58). After receiving the news that her father was...
This novel went into how she and her father both were similar in how they expressed and experienced their own identification in gender roles. Either it being shown in their own way or even it is being through one another, they did not realize how close they were until she understood herself at the end. This then became the opening to them discusses their life experiences that involved identifying with another gender, which made them gain a better understanding about each other. The reason why the readers gain this perspective was how she used this graphic novel technique to become concise and obtain a mutual understanding in what she was expressing and explaining throughout the novel. With this mutual understanding of how she made this graphic novel, then the readers can focus more on how in the beginning they thought they were very different people, but later on grew to understand that both choose different gender roles. This gave them many similar outcomes, which help them grow even closer than they were before. With that Bechdel stated at the end, “ He did hurtle into the sea, of course. But in the tricky reserved narrative that impels our entwined stories, he was there to catch me when I leapt.”, which suggest that even if he is gone in real life he is still a part of her life’s
Throughout the story, Walker uses brilliant imagery in describing each detail of what the mother sees through the eyes of her world. This imagery in turn creates a more interesting and imaginative story, and allows the reader to experience what the narrator is experiencing. The theme of imagery is not within the story, but how the story is told. However, the theme of love of one's family heritage is within the heart and not on the wall.
In her novel Fun Home, Alison Bechdel recalls the difficulty to communicate to her father who seemed to live in an entirely different world than her. Her father is a mystery; hiding his homosexuality behind an elaborate lie. Often depicted as distant and angry he turns out to be possibly the most influential person to Bechdel. He has many flaws but Bechdel explains she is thankful for some of those since they helped form who she is today, and ultimately is the reason she is alive. The only way to elucidate her father to the audience was to use those same fictional literary works to describe her father’s true character that he lived in because when conversations weren’t present there were still connections between them two through books.
In Alison Bechdel’s comic “Compulsory Reading”, she creates an image of how she feels about the world of creative writing. Bechdel mentions different authors and well known titles like “Beloved”, Romeo and Juliet”, and Charles Dickens. She also mentions her distaste to novels as well. Bechdel uses media and design, rhetorical patterns, and tone to communicate how she feels about literature.
In Julia Alvarez’s short story, “Snow,” an immigrant student, named Yolanda is learning the American way of doing things. She learns that there is ugly and hatful war going on in the world around her. Sister Zoe, Yolanda’s catholic school teacher, explains to her and her classmates what a bomb is; a mushroom shaped explosion with white specks of dust filling the air. However, when Yolanda sees actual winter snow for the first time, she confuses this snow as bomb dust. After Sister Zoe explains that this is snow that Yolanda is seeing, and not a bomb, Yolanda realizes that snow, unlike a bomb can be a beautiful thing to witness. Julia Alvarez’s last sentence of her short story epitomizes the true meaning of snow, and how it can represent human beings. Julia Alvarez writes, “Each flake was different, Sister Zoe had said, like a person, irreplaceable and beautiful.” Key words from this sentence are, “flake,” “different,” “person,” “irreplaceable,” and “beautiful.”
In Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel entitled Fun Home, the author expresses her life in a comical manner where she explains the relationship between her and her family, pointedly her father who acts as a father figure to the family as she undergoes her exhaustive search for sexuality. Furthermore, the story describes the relationship between a daughter and a father with inversed gender roles as sexuality is questioned. Throughout the novel, the author suggests that one’s identity is impacted by their environment because one’s true self is created through the ability of a person to distinguish reality from fictional despotism.
In his narrative poem, Frost starts a tense conversation between the man and the wife whose first child had died recently. Not only is there dissonance between the couple,but also a major communication conflict between the husband and the wife. As the poem opens, the wife is standing at the top of a staircase looking at her child’s grave through the window. Her husband is at the bottom of the stairs (“He saw her from the bottom of the stairs” l.1), and he does not understand what she is looking at or why she has suddenly become so distressed. The wife resents her husband’s obliviousness and attempts to leave the house. The husband begs her to stay and talk to him about what she feels. Husband does not understand why the wife is angry with him for manifesting his grief in a different way. Inconsolable, the wife lashes out at him, convinced of his indifference toward their dead child. The husband accepts her anger, but the separation between them remains. The wife leaves the house as husband angrily threatens to drag her back by force.
Many believed that Modernist works were not “art” because they did not always look like real life. But what is “real life”? A new outlook on reality was taken by Modernists. What is true for one person at one time is not true for another person at a different time. Experimentation with perspective and truth was not confined to the canvas; it influenced literary circles as well.