A Refolding of Tales Fiona Lu College

Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home has the polished surface appearance of a charming comic about a young girl’s coming of age and struggles with self-identity. Bechdel’s strong personal voice emanates from the text with a captivating candor that renders Fun Home as an honest and raw memoir to the inattentive eye. Yet upon closer examination, one might notice the almost too perfect story-arch mold of the novel that blurs the line between fiction and reality. Unmoored by tragedy, Bechdel sinks down a rabbit hole of fiction to escape from her reality, a coping mechanism well-manifested in her literary comparisons to her own world. Most prominently, Bechdel incorporates references to Greek mythology and James Joyce’s Ulysses to build a framework for understanding reality in relation to fiction and literature. Beyond the ubiquitous references, Fun Home’s entire thematic design is organized around a continual juxtaposition between autobiography and fiction. However, one thing is certain: Bechdel effectively crafts her self-portrait as a mediation between fiction and reality to tease out the relationship between her father and herself, borrowing the story arch of Joyce’s Ulysses spoken through Homerian language to serve as explanatory models...