Emotional Inaccessibility, Complex Narrative Story-telling

Fun Home is a complicated, multilayered narrative complete with flashbacks, imaginings, close-ups on highlighted texts, and constant mythical parallels (Icarus, dedaulus, Adam’s family, Mephistopholes). The wide framing of the graphic memoir imbues it with an allegoric quality itself, that Allison’s story reaches far beyond her own life and into the lives of her grandmother, grandfather, father, as well as the great mythics themselves. Through this wide framing, the reader is able to track certain intergenerational traumas that occur between the generations of characters, each panel fitting in to a larger family structure. A moment that exemplifies this is when the father calls Allison into the embalming room. Until this point, the father has been characterized as cold, stoic, and not offering affection towards the children, and at times abusive. There isn’t much explanation about his inability to access emotions, but he calls Allison in to the embalming room to a grotesque panel of a dead naked man with a gaping chest cavity to ask her to pass him the scissors. Allison reflects on her father’s utter lack of emotion when dealing with the dead, and internalizes it. When her father dies, she finds herself incapable of accessing the ‘normal’ amount of grief, only crying for two minutes, greeting her brother with a grin. Her most dramatic moves are violent physical gestures, throwing off the funeral director’s comforting hand / throwing the flag on the grave into the cornfield. These violent gestures are mimetic to her father’s physical hand towards her. Even while he’s alive, she feels as though he’s already gone, and when he’s gone his violent emotional and physical tendencies resonate in Allison’s and her brother’s characters.

Bechdel recognizes of flaws as a storyteller based on how society frames gender in favor of fathers “Although I’m good at enumerating my father’s flaws, it’s hard for me to sustain much anger at him. / I expect this is partly because he’s dead, and partly because the bar is lower for fathers than for mothers” (22). Across these short narrated lines, so much is conveyed. Instead of a hovering omniscient voice, the narrator self reflects as to why she says certain things and why she has certain beliefs. This brings the narrator down to the reader’s level in helping to understand her thought process: she has feelings that conflict with her father’s actions growing up, but due to internalizing society’s general acceptance of abusive fathers, her anger towards him does not last. Furthermore, Bechdel’s recognition of her conflicting feelings towards her father is also an acceptance of her subjectivity as a narrator, and a cue to the reader to not necessarily trust her, or to also consider the social / political context from which she’s writing (growing up in the 60’s in Pennsylvania and then writing Fun Home in the 2000’s). These lines complicate the narrative as a self-reflective, adult looking back graphic memoir. Also, Bechdel’s recognition of her complicated and conflicting sympathies for her father based on his suicide and gendered societal narratives make the reader feel part of her thought process for returning to her childhood, reflecting on it, and crafting on it.

             

Andrea