Blurred Lines

 Nathan Galloway

11/3/2020

EN387

Fun Home

            The strongest theme in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home is her focus on the blurred lines between fiction and reality. She explains how her father built an image of her family for the rest of the world to see but did not live that truth behind closed doors. These blurred lines affect her later in life. She begins to write in a journal and has trouble remaining grounded in her experiences. She becomes obsessed with discounting her memory as if she was a philosopher unsure of their epistemic knowledge. She sees her past as a story and a narrative rather than a factual series of events.

A centerpiece of her writing is a reliance on classical stories and images from well-known Western literature to compare and frame her life. She becomes obsessed with bridging the gap between “the symbolic and the real, of the label and the thing itself” (Bechdel 147). Once again this does not allow her to remain grounded in her experiences. 

There is a sense that Alison best understands her life through the lens of a Greek myth or a Bible story. The comparison between modern life and a classical tale is not in and of itself harmful. However, her comparisons come from a past that was filled with distant parents, obsessive behavior, and a general misunderstanding of the events around her (her father’s sexuality, her parents’ relationship, etc.). Her comparisons are a coping mechanism to be grounded in something if she couldn’t be grounded in reality. 

The use of Biblical allusion in Fun Home relates to the lesson that I just had with my tutee. She had to analyze a Puritan poem from the 17th century which had tons of Biblical and classical allusion. In English, these two categories (the Bible and classical literature) have such an impact on modern literature and pop culture that it makes you question if Alison’s act of grounding herself in these texts is nothing new and just an extension of Western behavior. 

 

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