Along with that, after watching the YouTube video of her talk about Fun Home, Bechdel mentions her diary entries from inside Fun Home as her first draft of the book. Did you make a similar connection between the book and the diary? Also within the diary how did she begin to experiment with the idea of image and text interacting? How did this effect our perception of her diary and thoughts?
Lastly over all what did you think of the book as a whole? What did you think of the non-linear format? Do you think she accomplished her goals of telling her coming of age story through the death and memories of her father?
I think that it was a successful autobiographical comic, and not just because of the fame it garnered the author with the play and such. I think it succeeded by finding something insightful in everyday life by virtue of transforming an unusual life into a powerful narrative. This graphic novel was much, much better than Stuck Rubber Baby because I felt that Stuck Rubber Baby was too confessional, too personal, and wholly uninteresting. Fun Home unfolds in a discursive manner that makes it difficult to summarize right away and does not form a full picture until the very last panel. Events take on richer meaning as we pass them in different contexts. The story was told with richness that is absent from most fiction, let alone a conventional autobiographical story.
ReplyDeleteThe color lends to the fact that the events that Bechdel is recounting happened in the past and in a time period completely different from our own. It also gives it a sort of newspaper color to it like a comic strip. In terms of a coming of age story I think it lends to the detachment we start to feel when we get older. Sometimes it can feel like a lot of the things we experienced as a child didn’t really happen and has the filling of a completely different time period (this is especially true when considering the rapid change of technology in our lifetimes thus far).
ReplyDeleteI didn’t make the connection but the comic is certainly more in depth than her diary entries appear to be. I can certainly see where the inspiration came from as she found that her diary glossed over a lot of important, private events in her life. The diary is one of many instances in the text where she is more interested in replication rather than simply using the same text and image for everything. She first demonstrated this with the map she used showing the location of her house, where her father was killed, the funeral, etc. The diary reveals her insecurities about herself, her family, her sexuality, and the like. Even if events in life like becoming sexually mature play a huge part in growing up there is a sense of embarrassment and the need to not record such a thing. The first period is just about always a deeply engraved memory that there’s no need to write it down. Regardless if you remember the date you’ll always know how it happened. As with her family many of her interactions with them at the age she was when she wrote in the diary were likely mundane and she hardly felt the need to write down the tension between them all. She knew it was there so why bother recording it?
I really enjoyed this book. I always find it fascinating to read about people discovering their sexualities along with dealing with a difficult family. It’s a bit reassuring to know that everyone has struggles with their relationship with their parents while also being deeply confused about who they are, what they want out of life, and come out of it more or less satisfied. I think she did a great job of relaying not only a coming of age story but a story that shows the contrast of gays and lesbians coming of age in different political atmospheres that is particularly emphasized through her father’s death and her memories of him and the conflict that comes with all three.
The color of this novel is very different from the ones that we have read in the past. The use of color does appear to have a more depressing tint to it. That's probably the reason why it was used for this comic. The entire story is bleak and depressing, so the use of color was appropriate for creating emotion for the story.
ReplyDeleteThe diary within the story of Fun Home was a nice touch, but I wouldn't call it a first draft for the book itself. The diary just appears to be a notebook that has information for when she actually writes. When someone wants to write a book, the person usually should jot down notes so that they can backtrack what they are going to write, not not get lost within their own story. When I first attempted to write a novel myself, I had an entire note book filled with notes that helped keep the story going. I've also noticed that Bechdel has experimented with image and text interaction. Based on the...drawings... of the diary, I think that this reveals her true self as a lesbian. This doesn't effect my thoughts as much, but the drawing to show that she does not want to hide herself anymore, and has done such with bold drawings.
This book was definitely not like the others. I found it interesting that a coming of age story would tie into a story of discovering sexualities so well. This is the kind of combination that you don't usually find in most stories. But the best part is that it does seem realistic. The main character is seen struggling with her sexuality and her family. This type of realism it the kind that people enjoy to read. Overall, I'd recommend this to anyone.
I actually found the use of a kind of faded blue as her only color to be rather interesting. It made it easier to read because I didn't have to focus on too much. I think Bechdel relied more on the text than the imagery for this book. However, that's not to say that color wasn't useful in American Born Chinese. I found the use of color delightful and I think that it added a lot to the story. But for Fun Home, the green-grey ink wash gives the whole book a sort of somber tone and is truly reminiscent of a funeral home.
ReplyDeleteI did make similar connections between the book itself and Bechdel's diary. I found her experimentation with the circumflex in her diary to be very intriguing. It gives the reader the impression that as a young girl, Alison was already beginning to deny a great deal of her own feelings, emotions, and thoughts, such as her homosexual tendencies and inclinations. It soon becomes an obsession that literally becomes an obstruction to the rest of her life. What good is a diary if not even its author believes its contents? Alison's doubt and insecurities as a young woman reflects her father's doubts and insecurities about himself.
I enjoyed the book. I thought that its format was well-thought out and that its themes were sufficiently explored and discussed. It carried a powerful and personal message and really evoked a response from me. I also really liked her use of allusions to other literary works. It gave the book a weight of importance, but also helped Alison to better illustrate her father's personality, as well as make some very interesting and intriguing insights about her life. Because of these things, I think that Alison was better able to share her childhood and coming of age with the readers.
I find the slight coloring effective in a coming of age story, as it is told through memory, and it reflects how memories can often be colored in a specific hue, especially one with content such as this. I think that more than image and text interacting, the diary explores signifier and signified interacting. Brief declarations cannot capture the neuroses that plague the young girl. I'm not sure that we are left to ourselves perceive the diary as an insular text, as the narrator explicitly references their unreliability and the mental state in which they were written so obscurely.
ReplyDeleteThis has been my favorite of the assigned books. I find it to be the most well written, refreshingly literary with an incredible vocabulary. I would argue that this is the most complex of all of the graphic novels assigned. The unfavorable parallel between daughter and father is effective and affecting. Can't say what the author's "goals" were, but I find Fun Home to be a well-developed and thorough portrait of conflict and confusion, and the sorting out of it all.
I really loved the use of color(ish) in the novel; I think it is very believable that Bechdel would think back on her adolescence as a very gray time. She was coming to her realizations of gender and sexuality without being able to fully express herself. She also probably felt pretty oppressed in her house with her commanding father and unhappy parents. Leaving the page just black and white would allow the audience to fill in the spaces with whatever colors they wish, but with her use of grayscale, or slightly blue scale, the audience must see the scenes as a rather bland environment.
ReplyDeleteI love the idea of her diary kickstarting her novel. Her diaries are basically the comics cells where she fills in whatever content she believes necessary. She also develops a system of symbols, where the symbol speaks just as loud or louder than the text. The audience is then led to believe that because of her obsessive compulsions, she enjoyed sticking text or images into tiny, organized boxes; we are placed into her compulsions and see how her coming of age realizations are then organized into boxes of important information that tells a story.
Bechdel's coming of age story is interesting. I definitely enjoyed reading it (even more toward the end because I have read Joyce's Ulysses, which is definitely not an easy read). The art in this novel is probably my favorite so far. I love that she paints us a picture of a disconnected father and draws us into his world as she is drawn into it. She has been surrounded by death her entire life, so I find it extremely interesting the way her father's death affects her. It is definitely an interesting novel.
The non-linear format and the diary kind of went hand and hand for me. It reminded me of an oil painting where the story is put down in layers. First we see the sitation from this light (one specific part was the snake encounter), and then she comes back in later and fills it in with more information, and later again with more. I thought introducing the diary was a good way of doing that and at times I felt like the story went in circles instead of a straight line forward. It's hard to really do anything with a character after he's dead though, so I suppose Bruce dying and then going back to memories of him alive were more affective in light of that.
ReplyDeleteThe color scheme seemed cold to me, but I took that as intentional. Alison's mother and father were both pretty cold in this narrative. We don't see many bits of affection at all.
Like so much else in the book, I think Bechdel's choice of a monochromatic visual was a clever and subtle play on words. The entire text is incredibly literal in nature, rife with references to countless classic texts. A traditional novel consists of black words on white paper, much like this novel. But a novel can easily show a world full of color; again, much like Fun Home. Showing the comic in black in white is a play on the fact that though we often want to see the world in black and white, it is anything but. Bechdel struggles through this story trying to understand things in simple terms, i.e. black and white, but it simply isn't possible. So the monochromatic pictures are another play on this theme.
ReplyDeleteI can easily see Bechdel's diary entries being a sort of first draft for what would eventually become this book. What little narrative structure they contain is fairly similar to this book in that it is both linear and nonlinear at the same time. More importantly, having those entries available would have made compiling all of the memories used in this book so much easier as she would have access to the inner thoughts of her younger self (to an extent, anyway).
As for the ending, I felt it very appropriate. She told the story she needed to tell, but she intentionally left it somewhat unresolved at the end because there are feelings she will never be able to quantify. She will never have a full understanding of her father, and will likely continue to have questions about herself, just as we all do. As such, leaving the story unresolved at the end only makes sense.
I love what Devon said about the newspaper color, I was thinking the exact same thing. It kind of creates a bit of a distance from the story, almost a professional distance in a way. It made it feel like it was meant to be a more of a retelling than a personal story, even though it's very personal. I really liked the approach, as it mirrored her attitude towards the whole situation pretty well. I like what Dean said too about the black and white being ironic showing that the world is usually anything but black and white. A very poignant point, and something that I think resonates well with the story. This story is very much laying out the fact that people aren't black and white. They aren't just bad people; there's always good somewhere deep down, and in good people, there's bad too.
ReplyDeleteThe diary comparison makes total sense. It really felt like a diary. I wonder if that's why she decided on the comic book form vs the novel form. It feels much more like a diary, and getting the visuals makes it much easier to bounce around from point to point, and leave the general narrative flow. In a novel form, I think this general bouncing around wouldn't have really made sense. But as a comic book, it felt right in a way. I liked the non-linear format of the novel; it was jarring at times, but pretty straight-forward, and it felt really natural. I honestly think it was on of the best ways she could have done to get her story across. Over all, I really enjoyed her take on the autobiography.
When I first read Devon's comment about the color resembling a newspaper, I was shocked. After looking at the graphic novel from this perspective, I looked at the story in a different way, like she was conveying her story like it was a piece of "news" or that the issues surrounding sexuality and determining her sexuality was something unheard of, it was a message that needed to be conveyed to a larger audience.
DeleteThe use of muted, cool colors really helps develop the tone of the story - mainly one that analyzes themes of loneliness, acceptance, and self-reflection. There's a very stark element to the way that this book is presented, and it doesn't really make an effort to conform to what the reader's expectations might be. It uses a nonlinear format, shies away from color, uses big, bold page layouts in lieu of more traditional structure. To me, every element of Fun Home legitimately feels like it's an extension of the author/artist behind the work. Like, directly and intimately so. This isn't Bechdal's life shone through a particular lens, it is simply presented as is. The color, the pacing, the narrative structure, these are all elements of Bechdal's personality made manifest in the book itself. She's there, on every page, in every panel. She is a constant element throughout the book, simply by proxy of how it is told. And I think for a story that reaches as deep as this one does, that's really important. That really helps to build a connection to the reader on a more intimate, personal basis. So, in that light, I think the choices she made in this book were very successful.
ReplyDeleteI felt like the color scheme went well with the grim nature of the story and helped to convey it as a tragic comic. I definitely see the connection between the novel and her diary because in her diary she expresses moments when she is unsure of her own interpretations of her own life. We see a similar trait in her novel that surrounds the death of the father. She seems sure that it was a suicide, but also says that it could have been a legitimate accident. Then she comes up with many speculations that support it was or wasn’t a suicide. Never quite fully committing to one or the other. This made me skeptical of a few details in her memoir because of how she would fixate on certain instances, or would be preoccupied with other issues. This may have been her intention because at its core, our memory can be unreliable even with the assistance of a diary. Overall, I liked the book and thought I offered great insight to the struggles that one can endure due to the questioning of their own sexuality.
ReplyDeleteI thought that the use of color added character to the comic as well as made the reader think about the significance of it. I believe that the use of the bluish color added an element of depression. Blue can signify many things when looking at the meaning behind it but when I think of something blue, I think of something depressing or sad. This color reflects the story of Bechdel.
ReplyDeleteIf Bechdel’s diary entry was a first draft of the book, I noticed similarities but couldn’t grasp the full effect and connection it had with the graphic novel. I was a bit confused by this at first, I had a hard time connecting the diary (or first draft) with the over-arching concept of the novel. I guess it’s because it wasn’t put into the graphic novel form so I had a hard time figuring it out at first.
Overall, I thought the graphic novel was successful in conveying her life. Although I like reading about racial issues and such, I enjoy reading about sexuality more. Why? Because it is a more recent “issue” in today’s society which is causing more books to arise about it. This story can also help put perspective on how to deal with my students and sexuality.
The color definitely follows suit to the way Bechdel is writing Fun Home. It is stark and cold. Similar to the story being told and the manner in which many of the people spoke. It fit really well.
ReplyDeleteOverall the book was amazing. After looking at the cover the art was kind of lackluster, but once I arrived at the first chapter's cover image, I was hooked. I got over the artistic style because I saw that Bechdel was using it intentionally, not because it was the limit of her skill. The intent gave a new appreciation to the work as a whole. While she jumped around within the story, I found the flow natural. As if she were telling me the story in front of me. It reminded me of Maus when Artie told Vladek to tell his story in chronological order, when Vladek was starting to jump around. Yet I was glad Bechdel embraced this. Instead of writing in order of events, it felt as if she was writing in the order in which her coming of age made sense. Describing how certain events made her come to certain conclusions, and how maybe she didn't notice their connections chronological order but in the way she wrote them.
I think the color Bechdel used definitely suited "Fun Home" because the green/grey color added a depressing tone to the book which I found pretty depressing for the most part. At times it was humorous but overall I was rather depressed while reading it because I felt so bad for this family and everything they went through. Growing up with a father who was difficult must have been very hard and I found their relationship was so strange. There was obviously a lot of love there but it was also so strained at times. The personal issues her father was dealing with coupled with her own problems of dealing with sexuality was hard to read. I like that you describe the color as an "inkwash" because it didn't overpower the story but was more of a background or wallpaper that contributed to the tone/mood of the book without being "present" like it was in "King."
ReplyDeleteI didn't think the diary was a first draft of "Fun Home" while reading the book, nor did I think she necessarily intended it to be a first draft while writing it, but instead I thought it "became" the first draft as she grew older and decided to write it. A lot of writers keep journals throughout their life and draw on what they've written in the past so this is how I viewed the diary.
I think she definitely accomplished her goal and as I said before I think the relationship with her father and the issues he had with his own sexual identity had a significant impact on how she dealt with coming to terms with her own sexuality.
I think it was interesting that Allison decided to use the blue/green ink wash. Since it is a coming of age tale I believe there is a strong correlation between her slective use of color and popular notions among adolescent males and females. When we have children the first thing we do is paint the nursery, blue if it is to be a boy and pink if it is to be a girl. This is a coming of age tale and the only colors Allison has chosen to use are historically associated with adolescent males. This may be a comment on her crisis with her identity as she tends to find herself in masculine endeavors. This is obviously just speculation but it does seem ironic that she chose such a limited palette for color.
ReplyDeleteAs for her diary I didn't see it as anything more than a plain diary. Calling it a rough draft seems to carry the notion that she intended to do something with it later. That being said there is definitely some experimentation going on between the texts and illustrations but nothing that would foreshadow her future writings.