Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

Nonfiction | Graphic Memoir | Adult | Published in 2006

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-3

Chapters 4-5

Chapters 6-7

Key Figures

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Chapters 4-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 4 Summary: “In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower”

Chapter 4 opens on an illustration of a photograph of Bruce as a child, wearing a women’s swimsuit.

The chapter beings with a renumeration of Bruce’s death, this time entertaining the idea that it was truly an accident. The truck driver who hit him reports that he jumped back “into the road as if he saw a snake” (89).

Alison writes about her father’s great love of flowers and gardening in contrast to her own childhood distain for them. She recalls lilacs as her father’s favorite flower and relates this to Marcel Proust’s In Remembrance of Things Past, wherein the narrator falls in love with a woman because she was indistinguishable from a lush garden of flowers. Alison goes on to describe Proust as a gay man in text boxes accompanying a sequence of the Bechdels greeting Roy the baby-sitter.

Alison states that she and her father were both “inverts” and “inversions of one another” (98). While young Alison wished to be masculine, her father imposed femininity upon her. Alison’s gender-nonconformity and her father’s sexuality resulted in their “shared reverence for masculine beauty” (99), a peaceful coalescence between them.

When Alison was eight years old, she, her father, her brothers, and Roy went on a vacation to the Jersey Shore. While perusing a series of photo negatives from this trip as an adult, Alison discovered a photo of Roy lying shirtless in bed.

At the end of this vacation, Roy, Bruce, and the Bechdel children drove to Manhattan to join Helen on the Lower West Side, a neighborhood where she and Bruce once lived together. This was Alison’s first time in New York City, just weeks after the Stonewall Riots. She recalls this visit as a “watershed” between her parents’ young adulthood in New York a decade prior and Alison’s own young adulthood there a decade later.

This chapter also details another vacation Bruce and the children took with one of his male friends, this time a yardwork assistant named Bill. While camping, Alison and her brothers encountered a huge snake. In her retrospective prose, Alison explores the symbolism of a snake in art and mythology: it is both phallic and feminine, and the ouroboros/world serpent “[implies] cyclicality, life from death, creation from destruction” (116). Alison wonders if, on the day of his death, her father saw a snake the size of the one she and her brothers encountered.

The chapter ends with more illustrations of photographs: one is the photo of young Bruce wearing a woman’s bathing suit. Another illustration in this section includes two photos: one of Alison and one of Bruce. In them, they are almost the same age and the details of the lighting and gestures are very similar.

Chapter 5 Summary: “The Canary Colored Caravan of Death”

Chapter 5 opens on an illustration of a photograph of a line of fir trees.

Two days before Bruce’s death, Alison dreamed of trying to show her father a sunset. Alison regards the connection between sunsets and death to be “maudlin in the extreme” (124). This chapter presents sunsets and sunrises as reoccurring images, emphasized by a sequence of young Alison photographing the landscapes around her home.

Inspired by natural beauty, young Alison once wrote a poem about springtime. Her father improvised a second stanza to her poem. Humbled by “his creative light […] [Alison] never wrote another poem” (130). She also recalls an instance wherein her father admonished her for coloring a caravan wrong in a Wind and the Willows coloring book. Alison found both of her parents’ artistic talents and pedantry “daunting.” She describes her childhood home as an “artist’s colony,” wherein each family member solitarily and compulsively pursued their chosen media.

At age 10, Alison developed OCD, which she identified by reading her mother’s Dr. Spock book. One of her most notable compulsions was qualifying every statement in her diary with “I think,” a phrase later represented symbolically with a “curvy circumflex” drawn over every word:

It was a sort of epistemological crisis. How did I know that the things I was writing were absolutely, objectively true? All I could speak for was my perceptions, and perhaps not even those. My simple, declarative sentences began to strike me as hubristic at best, utter lies at worst. (141)

During this period, the funeral home received three corpses in the wake of a car accident on the same road where Bruce would die nine years later. One of the victims was a male relative about Alison’s age. The stress from this event left her diary “almost completely obscured” (148) with circumflexes. Over the course of her adolescence, Alison “obsessively” deescalated her compulsions and recovered from the worst of her OCD.

This chapter closes on a childhood memory of Alison watching a sunset with her dad.

Chapters 4-5 Analysis

Photography is a motif that reoccurs throughout Fun Home and becomes the most central in Chapters 4 and 5. In Chapter 4, Bechdel picks through an envelope of old photographs shortly after her father’s death and uncovers evidence of his affair with Roy.

The picture was in an envelope labeled ‘family’ in dad’s handwriting, along with other shots from the same trip. […] A perusal of the negatives reveals three bright shots of my brothers and me on the beach followed by the dark murky one of Roy on the bed. In one of Proust’s sweeping metaphors, the two directions in which the narrator’s family can opt for a walk—Swann’s Way and the Guermantes Way—are initially presented as diametrically opposed. Bourgeois vs. aristocratic, homo vs. hetero, city vs. country, eros vs. art, private vs. public. But at the end of the novel the two ways are revealed to converge—to have always converged—through a vast “network of transversals.” (101-102)

This sequence presents photographs as pieces that are themselves “networks of transversals.” Here, the polaroid of Roy serves simultaneously as a piece of memorabilia and a piece of evidence, both documentary and art. Likewise, finding the image of Roy reveals the secret that Bruce was sleeping with underaged boys, but finding it in an envelope labeled “family” implies that Bruce earnestly cared for him. The mere fact that these photos are presented to the reader as photonegatives enhances their symbolic portent as inversions of themselves. This is heightened by Bechdel’s list of opposites—“Bourgeois vs. aristocratic, homo vs. hetero, city vs. country, eros vs. art, private vs. public”—which in turn mirrors her earlier description of herself as the “Spartan to [her] father’s Athenian” (15), etc.

Over the course of Fun Home, Bechdel includes sketches of photographs of herself and her family. This again presents photographs as simultaneous form and function. The reproductions of these photos serve as pieces of evidence for the reader to observe: here is the photo of Roy on the bed, here it the photo of child Bruce in a woman’s bathing suit, and so on. These sketches of photographs are introduced in the context of Bechdel herself pouring over them in her hunt for the truth. However, including detailed sketches of the photos expresses something different than what scans of the originals would have. By drawing the pictures instead of presenting the original negatives, Bechdel is not only showing the reader evidence of something; she is also showing the reader these artifacts from her own subjective perspective. Thus, her interest in the photos is simultaneously analytical and sentimental—two seeming opposites that coalesce naturally.