Fun Home: Do we trust Alison?
Fun Home is Alison’s attempted reconstruction of her father’s enigmatic accidental death. Throughout the novel, Alison jumps back and forth between understanding it as a random death and a kind of deliberate, maybe even artistic, suicide. Alison narrates in a very analytical tone. She constantly draws on evidence, citing books, pictures, and handwritten letters. Yet, the novel is still characterized by uncertainty. Alison often retells the same event again and again, each time revealing more details, perspectives, and interpretations. An example is her mother's reaction to Alison’s coming-out. At first, Alison recalls her mother telling her “your father has had affairs with other men (Bechdel 58).” Later, as if she had just remembered, she adds on that the victim is Roy, their babysitter (211). This sort of revision to memory makes the narrative more like a puzzle being actively pieced together than a fixed account. This novel isn’t Alison’s theory on Bruce’s death, but her working through Bruce’s death. It suggests that Alison’s telling is shaped by her choices of what to reveal and what to erase. In that sense, her telling is deeply personal and inevitably biased.
In addition, the book is entirely told from Alison’s perspective, which is penetrated with memories and hindsight. The inaccuracy of someone’s story being told from another's perspective becomes especially obvious in the understanding of Bruce’s first sexual encounter. Alison’s mother describes it as Bruce being molested (58). Yet, Bruce himself describes the experience as “nice (220).” His reminiscence even included details like the man was “well-built” and had “black, wavy hair (220).” The lack of trauma in the language really complicates our understanding of the event. This difference in interpretations shows how easily a storyteller can reshape a narrative to their biases. The difference makes readers question the reality of Bruce's experience. More significantly, it makes readers doubt Alison's narrative. If Bruce’s experiences can be reframed so differently depending on the storyteller, then how much of Alison’s own narrative can we trust? How can readers evaluate how much of her storytelling is distorted by similar biases? How would this story be different if it was told by Alison’s mother or her brothers?
We, as readers, would never know. Bruce to Alison is like Alison to readers. Alison works with evidence and memories left by Bruce, and we work with stories told by Alison. We are all like the frogs trapped at the bottom of the well. How wide the well is is how much of the world we can see. There are no limitations for us to suspect the scenery of the outer world, the “truth,” but we would never know.
Bechdel, Alison. Fun Home. Mariner Books, 2006.
Hey Ruijing! I really enjoyed your point on how Fun Home feels less like Alison presenting a final theory and more like her actively trying to work through her father’s death. I also liked your idea about memory revisions making the narrative feel like a puzzle. Additionally, I would like to commend your title as it was brief but really drew me in as a reader! Overall, this was a very interesting and fleshed-out blog post to read!
ReplyDeleteThis is quite interesting in terms of the walls being doubled, not only are we taking in Alison's bias but we are also taking in the bias she perceived from Bruce. We have to work to uncover the real meanings of man ongoings in this novel, not just working on reading the book in general. You did a great job of deconstructing this idea!
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ReplyDeleteHello Ruijing! I was totally thinking the whole time we were reading this book: how many/much of the stories Alison is telling are accurate? Especially with her renditions of photographs. They feel like they can't be denied because they were pictures, but they are still her interpretations of them.
ReplyDeleteI really liked your 'frog in the well' analogy. It resonated with me in relation to the book and tied together everything you'd mentioned nicely :)
Hey Ruijing! I really liked your point about how we are kind of in the same position as Alison when it comes to trusting what we are told. The example about Bruce's first experience being described so differently depending on who tells it was really good because it makes you question the rest of the story too. The frog in the well analogy was also a nice touch at the end. Good post!
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ReplyDeleteThese deep questions about all of the ambiguity around Bruce's experience lead me to ponder how much even CAN be known about another person's experience. This book is charged with an underlying bewilderment--how could all of this be going on right in front of her, and she didn't perceive any of it at the time? We can never know with anything close to certainty about the circumstances of Bruce's death, but at the same time, we can't know what he might have wanted to say to Alison in the car on the way to the movies, or what he might have said if they'd been able to get into the gay bar after the movie, or what he would have done after the divorce, or any number of unknowns. In a rather postmodernist way, which should be familiar from History as Fiction, Alison is quite comfortable projecting her own *fiction* onto events, in order to bring meaning and coherence to experience. Fiction doesn't mean that it's all fantasy, all make-believe, but it does entail a degree of comfort with the fact that so many crucial "facts" within the fiction cannot be verified (OR disproven).
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ReplyDeleteHi Ruijing, this blog was super cool to read! I agree that a lot of Alison's points can often be extremely biased. I think that the most reliable narration we ever get is when she draws on her memories from her diary. To be honest, I'm still a little suspicious about her insistence that her father must've died from suicide. I especially liked your metaphor about us being frogs stuck in the bottom of the well - we only get to see the world through Alison's carefully curated well-hole.
ReplyDeleteHi Ruijing! I definitely agree that Alison jumps back and forth with certain events and pieces of information, making it hard for us to really believe if Bruce died the way she is so certain he did. This book not being told in chronological order already makes it harder for readers to understand what happened and when, but with Alison choosing when to add more perspectives and interpretations, it makes us question if we can really trust her as a narrator. Great blog!
ReplyDeleteHi Ruijing!!! I really enjoyed reading your blog post. I really liked the comment you made, which was that this book is sort of like a puzzle because Alison is piecing things together while she learns new things about herself and her dad. I completely agree with you that we'll never know what the truth is with Bruce and his affair because we are being told it by someone who also doesn't know the full story and tells it the way she thinks it went through other people (her mother). You made some good points in your post. Good Job!!
ReplyDeleteHi Ruijing! I think you make a very important point about the reliability of Alison's narration, and I think it's a valuable thing to analyze in the context of Fun Home being a book about Alison's experiences as well as Bruce's. We learn a lot about Alison and the way she processes Bruce's death through her outwardly biased narrative, and even if we end the novel not being sure about Bruce, we still gain a lot of insight into Alison's mind. A lot of the backstory building is speculative, and it's disappointing that we'll never know the real truth, but as your first line says, it is a fascinating enigma.
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