Although there is no definitive proof, Bechdel points to several pieces of circumstantial evidence that support her conclusion. Soon thereafter, Alison's youngest brother, Young Alison sees a connection between her own family and the Addams family, whom she reads about in cartoons. Young Alison's indifference eventually comes to parallel Bruce Bechdel's latent homosexuality - a part of himself that he suppressed. Again, even at Bruce’s funeral Alison can’t process or even feel her own sadness.
The death of Bruce’s father is the event that triggers the end of the youthful honeymoon period of Bruce and Helen’s relationship. Bechdel believes that he committed suicide. Later, his daughter learns to suppress her emotional reaction to his death. Bechdel compares her father's physical appearance to Camus's and uses Camus's Bechdel reveals the "clues" surrounding her father's suicide using recurring images of words on a page, thus creating a connection between her father and the writers that she frequently cites. Helen (Alison's mother) flies there to marry him.
The kids found the tale endlessly compelling, begging Though Alison isn’t hit with the brunt of her grief right away, the grieving process becomes elongated for her because she is unable to process and work through her grief, instead keeping it as repressed as her emotions were upon seeing her first dead body. John and Alison’s eerie greeting indicates the Bechdel siblings’ inability to process and deal with their grief—instead, they both repress it, greeting each other with smiles instead of sobs, and not even discussing aloud the tragedy at hand. He even collects obelisks before his death, and this strange hobby comes to symbolize his pursuit of teenage boys. Chapter 2: Happy Death The second chapter in Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, starts with the death of her father. The Camus quote further alludes to a cynical view of relationships that sadly applies to Bruce and Helen’s marriage—Bruce deceived her in courting her by omitting his homosexual tendencies, but “to her advantage” because she fell in love, whereas right before Bruce’s death, Helen’s acknowledgement of Bruce’s true deceptions were to her disadvantage.
... PDF downloads of all 1342 LitCharts literature guides, and of every new one we publish. Our She wonders if her father is testing her; she doesn't react to the dead body.
They're like having in-class notes for every discussion!” Death is challenging for anyone to process, but Alison and her siblings have an even more difficult time than usual because their proximity and desensitization to death made their go-to stance in regard to death humor and distance.
-Graham S. Most children never see a dead body, and the visual Alison experienced this day in the Fun Home with her father seems to have shocked and traumatized her. Struggling with distance learning? Then, she admits that she might just have convinced herself that her father's death was intentional because it is less painful for her that way. Fun Home Introduction + Context. Plot Summary. Bechdel speculates that her early ability to suppress fear in the face of death led to her lack of emotion upon hearing about her father's death years later. Many of the drawings in Furthermore, Bechdel places her drawings in such a way to further underline a connection between Father and Camus. Many of the drawings in Fun Home contain written words, either in a book, a letter, a newspaper, or in the author's childhood diary. Not affiliated with Harvard College.Meghan Joyce Tozer. Though the interaction is casual for Bruce, since he deals with dead bodies on a weekly basis, for Alison this interaction is far from casual, and it hangs in her mind for quite some time, causing her to mute or suppress her reactions to grief. Bruce’s death exemplifies how blurry the line between reality and fiction can be—there is no way to ever know for certain whether his death was intentional or an accident; the empirical truth, as Alison continually points out, is inaccessible.