Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, By Alison Bechdel

880 Words2 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Alison bechdel fun home analysis

4: what makes Bechdel’s story interesting? What makes Bechdel’s story so fascinating is that she took what would have been an amazing novel and turned it into a comic book. Aside from the author’s lack of celebrity, she created a profound grippy story. Most autobiographies are written by famous people. Bechdal’s creativity as a writer and illustrator led her to capture thousands of satisfying details, with word and images, along with emotional truth and humor to produce this extraordinary first person autobiography herself.
5: what did you find most interesting about her childhood.
6: relationship with her father.
7: coming of age
8: Why is this book becoming more common in college classes-why do you think that is? Alison Bechdel’s best-selling graphic memoir, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic is …show more content…

Bechdel addresses some points that we see in today’s world regarding fatherhood and homosexuality, and Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, does a very good connecting those points with today’s society. Overall, she was able to understand and come to conclusions about things that she never understood while growing up. It was not until Bechdel was a little older and her father had passed away, that she realized that her father had a funny way of showing love. “But in the tricky reverse narration that impels our entwined stories, he was there to catch me when I leapt.” (Bechdel 232) The fact that that Alison’s father, Bruce, and herself were hiding their homosexuality and living a life that was far from normal, she was able to realize that the way her father was present in her life at that time, had to do a lot with gender role confusion, not knowing who he really was or accepting the truth leading him to his death. Besides the fact that her father never really showed much affection towards her, she still knew that her father cared in his own

Show More
Related

  • Fun Home Alison Bechdel Analysis

    1389 Words  | 3 Pages

    Alison Bechdel uses her graphic memoir, Fun home, to explore her relationship with her father. She uses the book as a tool to reflect on her life and the affect her father had on her. She discovers how her fathers closeted sexuality affected her childhood and her transition into adulthood. His death left a powerful mark and left her searching for answers. She clearly states this when she says, “it’s true that he didn’t kill himself until I was nearly twenty. But his absence resonated retroactively, echoing back through all the time I knew him.” (23). This feeling drove her to look back on their relationship and find what binds her so strongly to a man she never understood.

    Read More

  • My Home My World By Stephanie Coontz Summary

    358 Words  | 1 Pages

    Both Stephanie Coontz in “Great expectations” and Archena Bhalla in “My home, my world” address the issue about marriage and arranged marriages. While Stephanie mostly speaks on couples don’t make marriage their top priority and don’t last for a long time. And she gives an example by saying that “People nowadays don’t respect the marriage vowels.” She also believes that in the 18th and 19th centuries, conventional wisdom among middle-class men was the kind of woman you’d want for a wife was incapable of sexual passion which has changed in the 20th century. Also that marriage was viewed in the prospective that work relationship in which passion took second place to practicality and intimacy never was important with male. Bhalla speaks

    Read More

  • The Tough Childhood In The Glass Castle By Jeannette Walls

    351 Words  | 1 Pages

    The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls is a memoir told in the perspective of a young girl (the author) who goes through an extremely hard childhood. Jeannette writes about the foodless days and homeless nights, however Jeannette uses determination, positivity, sets goals, and saves money, because of this she overcame her struggles.

    Read More

  • Are the Kids Truly All Right? by by Liz and Diana Welch

    1564 Words  | 4 Pages

    "The family I strained to hear no longer existed" (Welch 196). This quote is said by Liz Welch; she lost both of her parents at the age of sixteen (Welch 168). Many people lose one or both parents at a young age. In fact, "one in nine Americans lost a parent before they were 20 years old" (Zaslow 1). Losing one parent usually causes a person to have detrimental effects, so losing both parents will most likely ruin a person's health. Even though the Welch children, in the memoir The Kids Are All Right by Liz and Diana Welch, have grown up and appear well, growing up without parents can have negative effects on a person because the cultural impact of the book details the negative outcomes and the historical information and professional reviews provides a context for it.

    Read More

  • Finding True Identity in Alison Bechdel's Fun Home

    1280 Words  | 3 Pages

    Picking up the book Fun Home, one would imagine that the novel would embellish some sort of comical life story of a misunderstood teenager. Although the short comic-book structured novel does have its sarcastic humor, Alison Bechdel explains her firsthand account of growing up with the difficulty of living of finding her true identity. Alison was a teenager in college when she discovered that she was a lesbian, however, the shock came when she also discovered her father was homosexual. I feel that the most influencing panel in Fun Home is where Alison and her father are in the car alone together. Not only does this panel explain the entirety of the novel in a few short speech bubbles, but it is the defining scene that connects both Alison and her father together for the first time (221). This explains the absences of Alison’s father in her life, and the scary realization that both characters are more alike than different. The car scene must be broken into spectrums to fully analyze what is happening. The only way to understand the Alison’s feelings to observe the illustrations and expressions she uses.

    Read More

  • Old Father Old Artificer Essay

    966 Words  | 2 Pages

    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...

    Read More

  • The Family Love By Eudora Welty

    802 Words  | 2 Pages

    BIOGRAPHY: According to the entry « Eudora Welty » found on Wikipedia, Eudora Alice Welty was an American author and photographer, well-known for working on the South American theme. She began higher education at the University of Wisconsin, then went to New York, where she studied at Columbia University until 1931. Unable to find a job on the East Coast because of unemployment due to the Great Depression, she went back to her her native city Jackson, Mississippi. She started to publish short stories in magazines from 1936 and rapidly acquired notoriety as a short story writer, managing to carefully describe the culture and the racial issues of the South. Each publication of her short stories collections was considered as a literary event. In 1956, her novel The Pounder Heart, adapted by Joseph A. Fields and Jerome Chodorov, achieved great success on Broadway. In 1975, her enchanting novel The Robber Bridegroom became a musical. In 1973, Eudora Welty received the Pulitzer Prize for her novel The Optimist’s Daughter. Three years earlier, she published a collection of photographs that she had taken herself in the years 1930 and 1940, One Time, one Place: Mississippi in the Depression: a work intending to depict the harsh living conditions in Mississippi during the Great Depression. In 1984, at the request of Harvard University Press, she put on paper a lecture that she gave the year before to the students: the work became a bestseller. She died of pneumonia in 2001.

    Read More

  • Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic Themes

    658 Words  | 2 Pages

    The novel Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel is about the Bechdel family, and the struggles that they endured during their lifetime. The Bechdel family lived in a town in Pennsylvania and directed a funeral home business. Alison’s father Bruce was having sexual relationships with men and boys, the mother Helen, was fully aware of Bruce’s adulterous actions. Alison discovered at an early age that she wanted to dress as a boy and she eventually concluded that she was attracted to women, and at the age of 19 she came out as a lesbian. Not too long after she told her mother that she was a lesbian, her mother revealed that she asked Bruce for a divorce, within two weeks of the revelation Bruce died. Alison suspected that it was a suicide when she began to discover evidence that would correlate to his death. The themes that were present in the novel range from gender identity, repression,

    Read More

  • Bechdel Fun Home Analysis

    1121 Words  | 3 Pages

    Although she didn't realize it fully until she was in college, Alison and her father have spent their lives dealing with the realization of their sexuality. Oddly enough, Alison’s preference towards women and her father's preference toward men became their bond. Her mother made her aware of her father's homosexual affairs when she decided...

    Read More

  • Happy Endings by Margaret Atwood

    1363 Words  | 3 Pages

    Margaret Atwood’s “Happy Endings” is an Author’s telling of societal beliefs that encompass the stereotypical gender roles and the pursuit of love in the middle class with dreams of romance and marriage. Atwood writes about the predictable ways in which many life stories are concluded for the middle class; talking about the typical everyday existence of the average, ordinary person and how they live their lives. Atwood provides the framework for several possibilities regarding her characters’ lives and how each character eventually completes their life with their respective “happy ending”.

    Read More

  • A Non-Chronological Narrative In Alison Bechdel's Fun Home

    484 Words  | 1 Pages

    Telling a story chronologically has the benefits of being more clear and easier for the reader to follow. Though, in some circumstances, it can help the story convey its themes and messages to tell the story in a non-chronological way. By doing so, the author can specifically choose, the important events and focus on them, or continually touches on certain occurrences to emphasize various aspects within them. Alison Bechdel in her memoir Fun Home uses a non-chronological narrative to demonstrate her way of thinking and how she continually thought of her past experiences with different perspectives as well as mimicking her live recollection of the events. This method of storytelling is effective for her memoir, as it allows the reader to step into her shoes a bit and see different possible views by repeatedly being exposed to the events she is fixated on.

    Read More

  • The Changing Family Values, By Natalie Angier

    1826 Words  | 4 Pages

    What are family values? One hundred years ago I feel this would have been an easier question to answer than it is today. Changing family structures and social norms have created a more fluid form of what we envision as a family. Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary defines a family as both “a group of persons with common ancestry” and as “a group of individuals living under one roof.” As we have discussed in class, a family is not simply nuclear anymore. In the stories we have read we have examined nuclear, single-parent, extended, and community-based families. All of which held the same feeling of importance and love for the people in it. With every family being unique, each holds their own set of beliefs or values which poses the question, what

    Read More

  • Mothers and Daughters in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club

    1798 Words  | 4 Pages

    Throughout Amy Tan’s novel, The Joy Luck Club, the reader can see the difficulites in the mother-daughter relationships.  The mothers came to America from China hoping to give their daughters better lives than what they had.  In China, women were “to be obedient, to honor one’s parents, one’s husband, and to try to please him and his family,” (Chinese-American Women in American Culture).  They were not expected to have their own will and to make their own way through life.  These mothers did not want this for their children so they thought that in America “nobody [would] say her worth [was] measured by the loudness of her husband’s belch…nobody [would] look down on her…” (3).  To represent everything that was hoped for in their daughters, the mothers wanted them to have a “swan- a creature that became more than what was hoped for,” (3).  This swan was all of the mothers’ good intentions.  However, when they got to America, the swan was taken away and all she had left was one feather.

    Read More

  • The Return to Laughter, by Elenore Smith Bowen

    900 Words  | 2 Pages

    Question: Misunderstandings between the anthropologists and the people whose ways of life he/she is attempting to understand are often the most revealing moments of fieldwork. Discuss one or two of Bowen’s mistakes and explore what they told her about the Tiv and herself.

    Read More

  • Sophie's World, by Jostein Gaarder

    811 Words  | 2 Pages

    In Sophie's World, Jostein Gaarder teaches philosophy and it explains basic philosophical ideas better than any other reading book or textbook that I have ever read. The many philosophical lessons of the diversified thinkers of their own time were dexterously understood. The author has a wonderful knack for finding the heart of a concept and placing it on display. For example, he metamorphoses Democritus' atoms into Lego bricks and in a stroke makes the classical conception of the atom dexterously attainable. He relates all the abstract concepts about the world and what is real with straightforward everyday things that everyone can relate to which makes this whole philosophy course manageable. ''The best way of approaching philosophy is to ask a few philosophical questions: How was the world created? Is there any will or meaning behind what happens? Is there a life after death? How can we answer these questions? And most important, how ought we to live?'' (Gaarder, Jostein 15).

    Read More

More about Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, By Alison Bechdel

Open Document