Moving on to the second panel, one can see a typical family scene depicted. Later, while standing over Bruce’s grave, Alison has trouble believing her father is really down there, though she knows deep down that he’s “stuck in the mud…” permanently. She discusses the landscape around Beech Creek, which is both naturally beautiful and industrially polluted. The kids are sitting around watching T.V., and from the balloon you also get the sense they are annoying each other. One can also see how the specific content of the pages thematically connects to the book as a whole. The book is, literally, a “tragicomic.” On a deeper level, it evokes the way that the memoir treats death as both tragically life-alternating and as comedic, in the sense that…, Bruce Bechdel is obsessed with keeping up appearances so that the outside world perceives him as something different than he really is. Through the use of nonlinear chronology, the author reconstructs her childhood and early adulthood around the roles of her parents, Helen and Bruce, and more specifically, the death of her father, marriage. "My students can't get enough of your charts and their results have gone through the roof." Teachers and parents! Image from: Tuts.com. Lines are used to depict the backboard of the T.V. Table of Contents (with links) 1 Fun Home is a graphic memoir in which Alison Bechdel describes her childhood and early adulthood. Alison then reveals that Bruce killed himself while she was in college, and though he lived through most of her childhood, she and the rest of the family felt his absence long before he was physically gone. It then got so bad that she would scribble “I think” over each entry, causing Helen to take Alison’s diary away until Alison decided to break her compulsions, which she eventually did. Alison gives a brief biography of her father, noting that he was born, lived, died, and was buried all within a two-mile radius in the town of Beech Creek, Pennsylvania. The house, then, felt to Alison like an artists’ colony, with each member of the family compulsively absorbed in his or her own pursuits. Young Alison Bechdel lives in Pennsylvania with Helen, Bruce, and her little brothers Christian and John. Again there is an interdependent relationship between the words and pictures because one wouldn't be able to tell what's going on by looking at the just the picture or just reading the words. LitCharts Teacher Editions. They're like having in-class notes for every discussion!”, “This is absolutely THE best teacher resource I have ever purchased. Upon their return to the U.S., Bruce inherited the Bechdel family-run funeral home. The chapter titles, the very framework of her non-linear narrative, are all references to works of (mostly modernist) literature that have influenced Bechdel over the course of her life. Reflections on Humor from Nietzsche to the Theatre of the Absurd 12 The original text plus a side-by-side modern translation of. LitCharts Teacher Editions. By incorporating themes such as sexual orientation, community, and communication, Allison created a story about understanding herself and her, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic illustrates the plight of a lesbian growing up in a household filled with secrets in every nook and cranny. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic is a graphic memoir by Alison Bechdel tracing her journey from young girl to young adult as she comes to grips with her own lesbian sexuality, her father Bruce’s (most likely) suicide, and his secret homosexuality or bisexuality that he kept hidden throughout his life while having affairs with underage boys. Alison recounts an incident where she and her friend Beth dressed in boys’ clothes, which Alison loved though it was short-lived. Eventually Helen moved to Europe to marry Bruce, but their time there was short-lived, as the couple had to return home to Beech Creek after the death of Bruce’s father. Alison narrates that Icarus—and Bruce—did hurtle into the sea, but Bruce “was there to catch” Alison when she leapt. Alison also compares Bruce to Marcel Proust in the way they intermingled their lives with fiction in order to conceal their homosexual proclivities, as well as their mutual obsession with the beauty of flowers. Teach your students to analyze literature like LitCharts does. Struggling with distance learning? From the creators of SparkNotes, something better. The subtitle, A Family Tragicomic, reveals the tone of the story for the audience by insinuating the existence of adversary in Bechdel’s family dynamics. Once you read Bechdel’s Fun Home, the significance of the title becomes clear. As a teenager, Alison was reluctant to bond with Bruce, but when she became a student in his high school English class, the two ended up bonding over an interest in literature. Instant downloads of all 1364 LitChart PDFs Then, a freak storm blew down old trees in the Bechdels’ yard, and rain through a window soaked Helen’s thesis the night before it was due. -Graham S. “Would not have made it through AP Literature without the printable PDFs. The Complex Home Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, is a graphic memoir written and illustrated with an elaborate process by Allison Bechdel. This also means that each word balloon depicts a single moment in time rather than all the figures speaking at once (McCloud 96-97). As Fun Home progresses, Alison is drawn deeper and deeper into her memories, finally entering into them, desperate (but unable) to reverse her father’s self-destruction. Alison remembers that, as a young girl, Bruce’s return home always signaled the end of her fun time with Helen and Christian. As in panel one, one can see details that bring the scene to life. Alison notes how books were just as important to Bruce’s intellectual development as her own, and she delves into his youthful obsession with F. Scott Fitzgerald. Alison falls behind reading Ulysses because she’s so obsessed with reading lesbian literature and exploring her relationship with Joan, her first girlfriend. The first chapter of Fun Home is named “Old father, old artificer” (a quote from Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man), and in it Alison details her father’s obsessive focus on restoring the family’s home to the point that she calls him “a Daedalus of décor.” Indeed, just as…, Instant downloads of all 1364 LitChart PDFs On the way to a movie, Bruce is honest with Alison about dressing in girls’ clothes and wanting to be a girl as a young boy, and Alison reminds him about how she used to dress like a boy. Shortly before Bruce’s death, Alison narrates that she had an eerie dream in which the two of them try to view a sunset but Bruce, lagging behind, misses it. It chronicles the author's childhood and youth in rural Pennsylvania, United States, focusing on her complex relationship with her father. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic is a graphic memoir by Alison Bechdel. Struggling with distance learning? Alison recounts a time when Bruce took Alison and her brothers to New York for the bicentennial of the United States. Teachers and parents! It depicts Allison’s childhood and understanding her sexual identity. Alison discusses the evolution of her O.C.D., which entered her diary first in the form of self-doubt, such that she would write, “I think” between each declarative statement. Alison notes that this is when she decided to come out of the closet to her parents, which caused Helen in response to tell her the secret of Bruce’s affairs and sexuality. Four months before, after realizing she was a lesbian by reading about homosexuals in a library book, Alison had written her parents a letter in which she came out.