Alison Bechdel's Fun Home

“Your life does not get better by chance, it gets better by change.” Jim Rohns quote highlights the basis of Debra Oswald’s play Gary’s house, and also Miroshav Holubs poem The Door. This essay will explore the notion that change causes people to shift their thinking and actions after significant catalysts. Gary’s House illustrates many of the issues and predicaments confronted by the characters and how their alteration in behaviour can have a beneficial outcome for them or others around them. The concept of "The Door" is based on the idea of taking risks and embracing change. The poet uses persuasive techniques to encourage and provoke the audience to take action.

In the prologue, Audre describes her “home” as being a place that could only be from a fairy tale (enchanted even). This home is somewhere Lorde never visited or never observed. She only knows this extraordinary place through her mother’s stories. As Audre grows older, “home” is something she does not have in life. She even expresses that the extraordinary place (Carriacou) from her mother’s stories in no longer the home, she longed for it to be (Zami 256). Even though her home was in Harlem, New York, Stamford, and Cuernavaca, they never felt like home. Throughout the novel, it appears that Carriacou helped Audre deal with the racist society. She finally accepts her character in society as a black lesbian. She in time grows to admit that

In the beginning, both families were just trying to adjust to the whole situation and feel comfortable with one another.  When the Vasquez family moves into the Kennish's guest house, the family relationships shift. Now, all the parents are criticizing each other parenting job and questioning their judgement, this causes tension.  The values and social norms for each family is

In chapter one of Barbara Kingsolver’s novel entitled “Called home”. The author observes that American’s are depending on the manufacturing of industrial made food and is leading to the ignorance of American’s not realizing where and how their food is processed, Kingsolver’s aims to expose the American food industry and inform the readers how their everyday food is made.

Through my understanding of the book, Homeward Bound by Elaine Tyler May explores two traditional depictions of the 1950s, namely suburban domesticity and anticommunism. She intertwines both historical events into a captivating argument. Throughout the book, May aims to discover why “Post-war Americans accepted parenting as well as marriage with so much zeal” unlike their own parents and children. Her findings are that the “cold war ideology and domestic revival” were somewhat linked together. She saw “domestic containment” as an outgrowth of frights and desires that bloomed after the war. However, psychotherapeutic services were as much a boom then as now, and helped offer “private and personal solutions to social problems.” May reflects her views on the origin of domestic containment, and how it affected the lives of people who tried to live by it.

Throughout the novel, A House in the Sky, by Amanda Lindhout, the audience can identify the theme of emotion versus logic. Within the novel, the main character Amanda makes a lot of life changing decisions, which are based more towards her emotions than logic itself. This strongly impacts not only her life, but also those close to her. Amanda Lindhout’s A House in the Sky is an exemplary depiction of the ideas of feminist criticism, new historicism, and moral criticism. Although Lindhout describes the consequences that come from her decisions throughout the novel, she also stresses the aggravation that comes with being female. The novel, A House in the Sky, portrays the complications of female development and identity through the main character.

Culture defines humanity. Culture makes humans different than any other living organism ever known. Culture is what makes humans unique, and yet culture is easily the most misunderstood characteristic of individuals. In Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan develops the theme of incomplete cultural understanding leads to an inability to communicate one’s true intentions through juxtaposition and conflict between mothers and daughters and their cultures.

Picking up the book Fun Home, one would imagine that the novel would embellish some sort of comical life story of a misunderstood teenager. Although the short comic-book structured novel does have its sarcastic humor, Alison Bechdel explains her firsthand account of growing up with the difficulty of living of finding her true identity. Alison was a teenager in college when she discovered that she was a lesbian, however, the shock came when she also discovered her father was homosexual. I feel that the most influencing panel in Fun Home is where Alison and her father are in the car alone together. Not only does this panel explain the entirety of the novel in a few short speech bubbles, but it is the defining scene that connects

The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan follows multiple Chinese-American women who struggle with their self-identity and creating a balance between American and Chinese culture. Because of their immigration and many hardships in life, many of the women feel like they cannot truly tell who they are anymore, and throughout the novel these women are portrayed as ghosts. Ghosts are used to symbolize these women because they share many parallels including being only a remnant of who they once were, or who they could be. Ying-ying St. Clair is one of the women, who has a daughter named Lena St. Clair, she has had a troubled past in China, which has made her lose her fighting spirit, and her spirit in general. Ying-ying is fully aware of her loss of spirit and is embarrassed because she considers ghosts to be shameful and weak, and wants to save her daughter, Lena, from her fate.

Fun Home is a retelling of Alison Bechdel’s life through the lens of her relationship with her father. However, because of what she considers to have been his suicide, Alison is left with an incomplete picture of who he was in life. By calling Fun Home an autobiography, Bechdel enters an autobiographical pact with the reader that ensures that what Bechdel is telling us is the truth. However, elements out of her control leave Bechdel unable to provide certain objective facts necessary to her narrative. As an attempt to remedy these absences and in turn maintain the validity of her story, Bechdel uses intertextuality to fill in the gaps of in her retelling. By overlaying masterplots of fictional narratives over her own, the reader is able to get at an understanding of the kind of person Alison’s father was. In this way Bechdel is able to reveal things about her father that she can 't prove to be true, but are reflective enough of his life to become true.

What is family in your opinion? Family can be a source of support, compassion, optimism, love and happiness, but family can also be a cause of depression, betrayal, hurt and pain. Family is not always determined based on having the same DNA but it is the relationships that people can make or have with one another. Family can consist of several different people like, friends, co-workers, classmates, a community, etc... Some family members can be your worst enemies because they have the most information of secrets to bring a relative down. Being able to trust a person, depend on them, and be carefree is a person that can be valued as being a part of a family. In the movie Little Miss Sunshine, their dysfunctional family is loving, supportive, optimistic and motivating. The movie is filled with humor about a modern middle-class family that is about to encounter a financial catastrophe but in the midst of their struggles they still find the beauty in life and the meaning in life. The beginning of the movie Richard, the father is giving a motivational speech about winning, he states “There are two types of people in this world, winners and losers”.(Little Miss Sunshine) Richard is a protagonist motivational speaker that is obsessed with winning. He is so consumed with achieving that he ridicules his family for not being perfect throughout the film. Richard trying to build up the ideal life or what he thinks is the ‘American Dream’ around himself. He chooses to ignore aspects of the life around him that he sees as unacceptable or out of sync with his ideal lifestyle, trying instead to fulfil his role as the authorative head of the family and provider. Sheryl is the mother who is optimist, she is always giving words of encouragement even when Richard is trying to bring down his family and she is all about being truly honest. Frank is the brother of Sheryl whom at the beginning attempts to commit suicide due to a broken heart and losing his standing as Americas pre-eminent Proust Scholar. Dwayne is the son of Richard and Sheryl and is committed to joining the air force. He also is very committed that he takes a vow of silence until he gets into the air force, but then he finds out he is color blind and breaks his

In the short story " The Birthday Party" by Katherine Brush, the author writes about a real life scenario of a married couple in the 1940's. Brush writes the story in a second-person narrative to have the reader experience the scenario. The author's main purpose is to describe the role and treatment towards women in 1940's society. The story starts off with the narrator (the reader) describing the married couple he/she saw while eating the the same restaurant.

Angela Carter wrote in various forms, she wrote novels, poetry, film scripts and she also translated the fairy tales of Charles Perrault and edited the Virago Book of Fairy Tales1. The Magic Toyshop is Angela Carter's second novel and winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize (1969)2. The Magic Toyshop is a Bildungsroman, it follows the coming of age of Melanie, as she becomes aware of herself, her environment, and her own sexuality. The Magic Toyshop can in many ways be seen as following the conventions of a fairy tale and has been categorised as some as 'Magic Realism'. In a Concise Glossary of Contemporary Literary theory this has been defined as “involve the sudden incursion of fantastic or 'magical' elements into an otherwise realistic

Part graphic memoir and part psychoanalytical study, Alison Bechdel’s, Fun Home, is a charming story about a girl’s search for identity within an unconventional family. The novel style autobiography frames Alison’s childhood and adolescence as she struggles with themes of sexual confusion, gender identity, and convoluted family dynamics. These ideas are explored through the examination of Alison’s relationship with her father, and their shared passion for literature.

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic is an autobiography written by Alison Bechdel. The graphic novel takes its readers through Alison Bechdel’s childhood using engaging diction and detailed drawings. One of the big themes of Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic is the discovery of one’s sexual orientation. Over the course of her life, Alison Bechdel eventually comes to the realization that she is a lesbian. Ultimately, Alison Bechdel uses this novel to recount her experience of events that helped to shape her personal identity, which resulted in a transformation of the way she sees herself. In the end, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic is a wonderful narrative that shows its readers the complexity of personal identity, and how things like love, the values of