Alison Bechdel's Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic
In our analyses of both Maus and Persepolis we determined that the figure of the narrator is always linked to the autobiography in numerous complicated ways, and this concept can be taken literally in the context of autography, or graphic memoir. The author has the ability to literally insert themselves into the text and narrate from two separate levels. One level inevitably sees the author as the figure who is telling the story, and the other sees the author as a character who interacts with the story as according to the limits of their memory. The graphic memoir, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, occupies the same literary space in the sense that it is an investigation of one's childhood to the effect of expressing an idea, thought, or feeling.
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These relationships manifested within her in different ways. The central figure of Fun Home is Bechdel's father in particular, a figure who is more or less shrouded in mystery to her regardless of how much information she is able to collect, both from her childhood, and all the way up to the uncertain circumstances of his death. For Bechdel, her memoir seems to be a method of retrospectively re-evaluating her own family history in order to ascertain a new truth. This method of processing information appears to be a project that she has taken numerous times throughout her life, beginning very early in her childhood with her neurotic diary-keeping, and continuing well into adulthood in the forms of graphic novels. In a sense, this reassessment of memories is the project of all memoirs, but Bechdel's graphic memoir functions particularly as what Ann Cvetkovich calls an “archive of feelings” (120). Initially, it might seem a little obvious to say that the memoir is an archive, but I intend to argue that Bechdel accomplishes this on a very sophisticated level. It is specifically the construction of this archive within the comic that I would like to investigate more closely in this
These relationships manifested within her in different ways. The central figure of Fun Home is Bechdel's father in particular, a figure who is more or less shrouded in mystery to her regardless of how much information she is able to collect, both from her childhood, and all the way up to the uncertain circumstances of his death. For Bechdel, her memoir seems to be a method of retrospectively re-evaluating her own family history in order to ascertain a new truth. This method of processing information appears to be a project that she has taken numerous times throughout her life, beginning very early in her childhood with her neurotic diary-keeping, and continuing well into adulthood in the forms of graphic novels. In a sense, this reassessment of memories is the project of all memoirs, but Bechdel's graphic memoir functions particularly as what Ann Cvetkovich calls an “archive of feelings” (120). Initially, it might seem a little obvious to say that the memoir is an archive, but I intend to argue that Bechdel accomplishes this on a very sophisticated level. It is specifically the construction of this archive within the comic that I would like to investigate more closely in this