Fun Home – Alison Bechdel

To me, a graphic text is a comic book, a thing for children, not a serious work of literature to study in class. Though through reading this, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the amount I could analyse from it. My initial thought of comic books are that they were for children, and the main focus of illustration and the lack of text would mean that there wouldn’t be enough things to analyse. I was wrong for thinking so.

There’s so much to analyse in a graphic novel – the contrast of light and shadow, the gutters, the choice of frame, the point of focus and so on. I’ve come to love analysing this novel, and hearing from my classmates about their ideas on Fun Home.

As it’s a graphic text, reading it (at least, for me) is difficult to read. The whole point of a graphic novel is for the graphics of it, and the text comes second. The illustrations draw my eyes away from the text, and I find it difficult to read through in a constant, rhythmic way like I would with normal novels. It’s a bit haphazard for me, so I try to read the text first, then look at the visuals second, which I’m pretty sure is not the way I’m supposed to read the book.

I originally thought that Alison’s story is told the main forcus of the book. It’s her childhood and her memories, but coming towards the end of chapter 2, Bechdel brings her father to the spotlight, talking about his life experiences and past stories, how he came to kill himself and his behaviour towards his family. It represents identity of two different people, yet by understanding the father’s and Alison’s view of each other, you get a new perspective on each character’s identity, reinforced by each character.

The image and text that I find most striking is by how much Bechdel goes back to the story of Icarus and Daedalus, comparing it to her relationship with her father. Further along the story, she says that her father treats “his furniture as children and his children as furniture”, which you can see so clearly in the text taken below. “Go get the vacuum cleaner”, “wash these old curtains” – he treats his children like they were servants and not living, breathing, human flesh of his own.