Analysis Of Alison Bechdel's Fun Home
Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir Fun Home uses visual repetition to produce a Text which plays with its reader and invites its reader to play. Bechdel’s father committed suicide by stepping in front of a Sunbeam Ranch bread truck, and throughout the novel Bechdel repeats the Sunbeam Bread logo in moments she wants the reader to interact with, to explore more deeply. She invites us, with this logo, to make connections, to move backwards and forwards through the text and pay attention to the use of repetition. This repetition produces complexity and imitates the layered, playful process of memory, which adds meaning to arbitrary experiences retroactively. The Sunbeam Ranch logo appears in scenes Bechdel now associates with loss: loss of her innocence,
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On the first panel of that page, Bruce Bechdel sits with his daughter on a tractor; they are together, aligned in the frame. In the second panel, Bruce shows Alison how to drive the tractor by herself, and for the rest of that page Bruce works alone planting a dogwood tree, facing away from his daughter, while Alison drives the tractor in a circle around the field. Symbolically, Bruce has given Alison control of the wheel when she is only a child, pushed her into a mature, adult role which perhaps she feels unprepared to take on, and then turned away from her. She moves cyclically on the tractor, towards and away from her stationary father, while she acknowledges textually that her father’s death “resonates” cyclically in her memory. It is worth noting that his outfit in this scene – short jean cut-offs and nothing else – is the outfit Bechdel draws her father wearing when he steps in front of the truck (Bechdel, 59). Repetition functions by asking the reader to look back through the text and notice moments of similarity. Like Bruce’s death, like Alison circling on the tractor, repetition creates resonances back and forward in time. Bechdel’s memories of her father when he was alive shift with the added weight of his death; every day he wore those jean cut-offs is a day he wore the clothes in which he
On the first panel of that page, Bruce Bechdel sits with his daughter on a tractor; they are together, aligned in the frame. In the second panel, Bruce shows Alison how to drive the tractor by herself, and for the rest of that page Bruce works alone planting a dogwood tree, facing away from his daughter, while Alison drives the tractor in a circle around the field. Symbolically, Bruce has given Alison control of the wheel when she is only a child, pushed her into a mature, adult role which perhaps she feels unprepared to take on, and then turned away from her. She moves cyclically on the tractor, towards and away from her stationary father, while she acknowledges textually that her father’s death “resonates” cyclically in her memory. It is worth noting that his outfit in this scene – short jean cut-offs and nothing else – is the outfit Bechdel draws her father wearing when he steps in front of the truck (Bechdel, 59). Repetition functions by asking the reader to look back through the text and notice moments of similarity. Like Bruce’s death, like Alison circling on the tractor, repetition creates resonances back and forward in time. Bechdel’s memories of her father when he was alive shift with the added weight of his death; every day he wore those jean cut-offs is a day he wore the clothes in which he