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.