To start off, the title of the graphic novel, Fun Home, is portrayed as an environment where people live usually accompanied by sweet memories of growing up, having fun, enjoying every moment of their childhood. However, Bechdel uses the word “fun,” short for “funeral,” to refer to Bechdel’s funeral home business, which is her grandfather’s (Bruce’s father, which is her father’s dads’) family business. In Chapter 3: “That Old Catastrophe,” the image of what seems like a dictionary takes up about half the page with certain words being highlighted. Bechdel uses the word “queer” to describe her father’s death in the following sentence: “My father’s death was a queer business – queer in every sense of that multi-valent word” (Bechdel 57). She expresses her father as being queer as an adjective, verb, and a noun. A combine form of meanings such as strange, suspicious, to put (one) in a bad position, and counterfeit are…
Considering Fun Home as a mystery novel, Bruce Bechdel’s death serves as the inciting incident which spurs Alison Bechdel to look through the “clues” -- memories, letters, photographs, etc. -- to formulate a judgment about her father’s life. Throughout the novel, it’s clear Alison’s relationship with her parents is tumultuous. Due to her father’s uptight, perfectionist nature, Bechdel finds it difficult to attain his approval and criticize him; moreover, she describes showing him affection “an…
To its uniqueness of a groundbreaking tragicomic, Alison Bechdel’s best- selling graphic memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic is an excellent read for English college classes. It delivers maturity and notice to the homosexual community. In the book, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic addresses multiple of themes being sexual orientation, suicide, gender, and the dysfunction of a family. Bechdel has brought personal scenarios that she has experienced and put them into her work. With the book Fun Home…
that our family was a sham. That our house was not a real home at all but the simulacrum of one, a museum. Yet we really were a family, and we really did live in those period rooms.” (Bechdel 17) These words of Alison Bechdel perfectly describe her family. Bechdel may not be widely recognized, however she did introduce the uniqueness of her book to the world as a tragicomic. As the writer and artist of this tragicomic, she only shows what she wants the readers to see. The work is a black and…
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel is an autobiographical graphic memoir that correlates her coming of age with her discovery of her homosexuality. Bechdel is also battling her inner fears that came along with her upraising but is baffled by the unearthing of her father’s own homosexuality. Her artistic decisions are affected by her homosexuality because she chooses to add stereotypical gender roles. Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic develops a proper story line by…
Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir Fun Home is a work that founded on conflicts and paradoxes between outward appearance and meaning. Even the title Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic appears incomprehensible. The phrase “Fun Home” all the same for first Family funeral home, that evidently is not something, a number of us would consider being fun. We tend to contemplate the phase “Fun Home” in relevancy the family’s actual house; it is clear that their family life is not notably fun with its upsides of…
dismal blue/green colour throughout most of Fun Home. The chilled, placid, and dismal tint reflects Alison’s distant relationship with her family. Bechdel illustrates this bleak blue/green colour with darker and lighter shades in certain drawings to attract the reader’s eyes to specific characters or…
Dig Deep Into Who, And What, And Why, And When Fun Home at the Circle in the Square Theater A few keys on a keychain. Not much to the average person, but to Alison Bechdel those keys opened up a whole new door she never knew existed. Broadway's new musical and Tony winner for Best Musical Fun Home is a remarkable story through Alison's Bechdels life. It tells the story through three stages of her life, but never going in chronological order. It focuses on the two main struggles in her…
The graphic autobiography assessed as a family tragicomic, Fun Home, written by Alison Bechdel follows the thoughts of Alison after the death of her father. In the excerpt, Alison premises the section by explaining that since her father’s demise, her mother, Helen, has diminished his collection of books. She then thinks back to a prior interaction she shared with her father. In the excerpt, literature is used throughout to compare and introduce the ideas that Bechdel is trying to portray through…
Fun Home is a unique story about a father and her daughter. Alison Bechdel is the daughter of Bruce and Helen Bechdel. She’s the oldest of her siblings: Christian and John Bechdel. Her family lives in a gothic revival house in Pennsylvania. The family owns a funeral home, which they refer to as the “fun home.” Alison Bechdel is a young female who grew up being forced into wearing feminine clothing, which was uncomfortable for her. This perpetuated her non-feminine urges more. Her parents,…