Themes and tunneling in Fun Home

Let me start by saying I have never taken into account how heavily presentation in a graphic novel mattered until I read fun home this time. Having lost my copy I purchased freshman year at Mills I downloaded it to my kindle, which shows only two boxes per page instead of whatever the physical copy has. The two boxes shown by the kindle are on top of each other in the middle of the page, with bright white free space around them. My chef friend would call this “staging.” It seems to emphasize more of what Bechdel is saying, and indeed, I had a deeper reading this time.

Bechdel seems to be a great fan of themes. There is the literary theme that her and her father share and is referenced in story and analogy form throughout the book. There is the Greek myth theme, which she begins and ends with. Perhaps the most obvious is the sexuality theme. In Bechdel’s memoir, sexuality, or the repression of it, is a catalyst for suppressed hostility on her part, her parent’s torturous marriage and her father’s death. In the end, Bechdel admits that perhaps she projects the identity of “gay” and not bisexual or something else, so she can keep him to herself.

In one of my other classes we’re talking about Virginia Woolf and how she “tunnels.” By tunnel I mean introduce a character or situation and then contextualize it with a background facts that end up being stories in themselves. This happens over and over again in Bechdel’s descriptions of her father; we learn more and more about him by this technique being used. Bechdel also seems to use a circling technique as the story isn’t completely linear. Such as with the snake story, Bechdel first tells it, and then tells it again in her vignette about her journaling and compulsions. This retelling of events brings depth the second time around, and this is the first book we’ve read so far that utilizes this kind of revisiting.

-Trinidad