Sensation of influence in Fun Home

Sensation of influence in Fun Home

Allison Bechdel’s graphic novel Fun Home details author persona Allison’s journey to realizing her homosexuality, particularly through the lens of her relationship with her father. Bechdel builds the book around her life growing up with her funeral home director/ English teacher father and how her family impacted her life. Allison’s father is reveled through the book to be a closet homosexual and a pedophile and Bechdel attempts to show how his particular affections and manners, in conjunction with these facts, formed Allison’s life. Overall, Bechdel doesn’t give any definable proof or examples of how her father affected her, but rather arrives on more of a sensation of influence in her life overall.

Bechdel uses an excessive amount of intertetuality in her work. Most of this intertexuality is in the form of the literature that Allison’s father reads. From the very beginning of the novel, Bechdel is comparing Allison and her father to Daedalus and Icarus. By using similes, metaphors, and intertexts, Bechdel attempts to give shape to the sensation of influence in her life, both from her father and from other various authors. Bechdel uses a reliance on her reader’s understanding of her intertexts to support this sensation of influence that she leaves mostly undefined.

In the end Bechdel really uses no specifically original material to define her coming of age and identification with sexuality. All of her experience is formed from some indefinable influence that she received from her father, and from texts which she read. Although Bechdel is attempting to give an open view of her past, she hides any real reasoning for her life within the interteuality.

Religous events in Maus

Maus by Art Spiegelman is a graphic novel depicting the author’s father’s experience as a jew during the holocaust. Throughout the narrative, Spiegelman’s father, Vladek, tells of many amazing and odd occurrences, not the least of which have religious symbolism or significance. Spiegelman tends to leave his father’s religious war stories open to interpretation, but includes such scenes as the Parshas Truma revelation and the gypsy moth to indicate although it may be random; there is a possibility of higher forces at work even in trauma.

Early in the novel, Vladek recounts a dream that he has in which he is told that he will be let out of a Nazi work camp by a certain date, a religious holiday called Parshas Truma. Vladek claims that although he was not very religious the dream gave him hope, and he went to ask a rabbi how far away Parshas Truma was. He learns that the date is some weeks away and eventually forgets his dream until amazingly on the day of Parshas Truma they are able to leave the Nazi camp. Spiegelman makes no comment on the occurrence through his author-persona.

Later in the novel, Vladek recounts how as the war has finally come to a close his wife, Art’s mother, was waiting for Vladek with little hope that he was alive. Desperate for word of her husband she goes to a Gypsy, represented as a gypsy moth, for any sign of hope. The Gypsy tells her that Vladek is very sick, but that he is coming home and that the two will soon be reunited. This is in fact exactly what transpires shortly thereafter. Again however Spiegelman makes no significant acknowledgement of the event other than simply relating it.

What is most significant in both scenes represented in the novel is Spiegelman’s lack of explanation. The reader is left to wonder if he is impressed with the stories, if he thinks that they are simply fabricated or distorted, or if he finds them significant at all. The best interpretation is to conclude that Spiegelman wanted the reader to decide what these events mean. If he thought that the events were totally without merit and pointless in every respect, it is unlikely that he would have included them, except maybe out of respect for his father. It is more likely that he found them to have some significance which, even if he didn’t wish to or couldn’t define, he still felt was important fot the readers to consider.