Allegory and Identity in Alison Bechdel's Fun Home

Throughout her graphic novel,  Fun Home, Alison Bechdel struggles to understand her fathers identity and his death through literary comparisons. There is so much left unspoken between the narrator and her father that books, literary references and the lives of famous authors become a common language. The book begins and ends with the narrator and her father interlaid with the myth of Icarus--contextualizing their relationship as well as the way stories coincide and break down when compared to her own life.

When Bechdel's father dies, she suspects that it was suicide--but without a note, her clue is his copy of 'A Happy Death' by Camus. (27)  Her father lives his life creating facades, both literal (redoing the ornate house) and personal (hiding his sexuality) and the narrator is left to try to decipher the subtext of his actions. She tries to make sense of him by imagining how he might interpret the books he read or use them as an outlet for his closeted identity. The narrator makes the Camus/suicide connection again when her father sends her 'The Myth of Sisyphus' with the line about suicide underlined. The book does not condone suicide, but as Bechdel adds--"I suspect my father of being a haphazard scholar" (47).  She goes on to compare her father to Camus, to place him and her mother in Europe when Camus died. The narrator has become a 'haphazard scholar' of her fathers own haphazard scholarship--she is searching for meaningful comparison where there may be none. She is studying a man who spent his life creating haphazard layers of identity.

The connections between the narrator and her father often come from their shared relationship to books as vehicles for expression of identity. Bechdel's understanding of her own sexual identity comes first through reading books on/about lesbian women (74). Books also become a vehicle for the the narrator and her father to discuss their own sexual identities. They seem to connect best, and appreciate each other the most, when discussing literature. When the narrator has her father for an English teacher he tells her she is the only worthwhile student. (198) Literature allows them to discuss uncomfortable or taboo topics. Their only real conversation about her father's sexual identity happens when Bechdel asks him about the book he gave her, 'Colette'. (223) Sharing books are a way for her father to create a subtext--a dialogue in which he doesn't have to reveal himself. That their conversation happens through the context of a shared literary experience is pointed, and explains the narrator's search for clues about his death in the books he read.

Bechdel also compares her father to Gatsby, as well as the author Fitzgerald, who died at the same age as her father (84). Later, she looks at her father's analysis of James Joyce's Ulysses. (227). When making comparisons, Bechdel's father repeatedly inhabits both the character (ie Gatsby) and the author (ie Fitzgerald). In this way, the narrator reveals her understanding of her father as someone with a double identity. Her father is both a character--the role that he presents to the world--and the author behind the fiction, whose true identity is elusive.

I found the last line of the book to be a beautiful summation of the way her layers of allegory function to illuminate the contradictions, messiness and stability of her relationship with her father. Although her father is gone, leaving little explanation for his choices, the books they share symbolize something constant and almost eternal:

"But in the tricky reverse narration that impels our entwined stories, he was there to catch me when I leapt." (232)