Parallels between Alison and her Father


    The novel Fun Home, like many of the other texts that we have read this semester, utilizes the past to help the narrator, Alison, understand the circumstances that she finds herself in.  Throughout the novel, she relies on moments and exchanges between herself and her father that allow readers to understand her upbringing, and the specific moments that led her to become the narrator who's words we are reading.  The ways in which Alison comes to understand her self and gain self-awareness are rooted in the identity that her father possesses and the way that he expresses himself throughout his life.  Their identities and histories intersect in powerful ways as Alison comes to know and accept herself.

    One pivotal moment that shows the ways in which Alison and her father's histories and stories overlap is through the photographs that she has.  The novel emphasizes a relationship between the father and daughter that is very much lacking emotional support.  The two have very brief pointed exchanges, and do not show any signs of affection.  However, when they do converse, Alison begins to understand herself through her father.  This is seen in smaller ways such as how they both dress, or the exchange at the Philadelphia diner, but in a much larger sense through photographic memories.  Because their relationship did not often breach such subjects, Alison turns to photographs and history to deepen her understanding.

    She writes, "In another picture, he's sun-bathing on the tarpaper roof of his frat house just after he turned twenty-two.  Was the boy who took this his lover" (120)?  She then poses, "As the girl who took this Polaroid of me on a fire escape on my twenty-first birthday was mine (120)?  She is beginning to see her romantic relationships as tangible and legitimate through her father's history with similar relationships.  The page ends with Alison writing, "The exterior setting, the painted grin, the flexible wrists, even the angle of shadow falling across our faces -- it's about as close as a translation can get" (120).  This beautiful sentence seems to solidify the ways in which Alison draws parallels between her father's adolescent experiences and her own.  She sees similarities in the photographs and all their details, but given the painfully emotionless relationship her and her father share, this is as close to translation as she can get.


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