A Loss of Future Time / Its Portrayal
Throughout Fun Home, Alison’s narrative voice changes with the period of her life she is describing. During class we kept coming back to the question of whether or not she is a reliable narrator. I believe she is at least honest if not reliable. The adult her who is writing portrays everything to us accurately to how the young her experienced it. However, this means things are presented to readers as previous versions of herself perceived them, sometimes lacking context or accuracy. The ultimate effect of this age-dependent narration is that it made Alison’s conclusions about her father and his death feel less substantial. It places the whole story on a shaky foundation, which ends up seeming true to the way Alison thinks about the events herself.
In her youth, Alison describes her life at home to be stifling. Bruce’s presence in her life feels tyrannical and controlling. He is depicted devoting more love to his house than his children, and using Alison and her siblings as props in this picture perfect family he is crafting. He controls each aspect of their lives, shown in Alison’s picture day outfit, and this ends up making Alison super anxious and possibly contributing to her debilitating OCD. As a young adult though, it feels like she doesn’t hold any resentment toward her parents for the atmosphere she grew up in. As readers we can feel the jump from her anger to something like understanding later in life. She literally acknowledges her lack of anger toward Bruce over his illegal relationships with younger boys; as she examines a picture her father took of Roy in bed she asks, “Why am I not properly outraged?” (Bechdel, 100). Exposing her bias/disoriented internal compass around her father makes us begin to question Alison as a narrator.
Another interesting thing for me was that the Bruce that was a father to six year old Alison felt like a completely different person than the Bruce that was a father to Alison in college. I wonder how much of the shift in Bruce’s depiction is due to Alison’s perspective as she got older/grew to relate with Bruce more deeply and how much is due to a real change in his role in her life. Bruce never seemed to fill the stereotypical role of a father for his children, but as they mature they depend on him less and less. Through high school and college it felt like his and Alison’s relationship turned into something like a mentor and mentee or teacher and student. Alison notes, “As I got older, he began to sense my potential as an intellectual companion,” (Bechdel, 198). Bruce controls the minor details of Alison’s life (what she wears, her hair, etc.) less and begins to communicate with Alison about shared interests. Their correspondence is depicted to - letters, phone calls, conversation - center around books and English class instead of the old arguments over appearance (of both Alison and the house). This perspective doesn’t only make Alison’s narration seem to be about two different people. Perhaps more crucially it starts to point out that Bruce died as his and Alison’s relationship was on something of an upward trend.
All of this circles back to the event at the center of the book. Bruce’s death, specifically as a suicide, is the keystone of the story, and yet it may not be suicide at all. Alison presents the death as intentional, but is that a fair depiction? As we talked about in class, she’s making this claim without any substantial proof. We see Bruce creating a future with him in it before he dies; he’s working on this new project and noting birds he wants to find. (Unless these are just elaborate cover ups..) I feel like Alison is trying to make his absence make sense, or at least to give it meaning. If his death was caused in part by her coming out, at least he was thinking of her. However, Bruce seems relatively unbothered by his daughter’s sexuality. (And the other Fitzgerald theory felt like it was probably a stretch.) Ultimately no one will ever fully know what happened, including Alison, and the writing portrays her disappointment in losing her dad before she could ever really know him.
I thought it was really interesting how you pointed out the drastic shift in Alison and Bruce's relationship once she was in college. I wonder if that shift was impacted by Alison's coming out in addition to her interest in literature. It seems that Bruce has a better understanding of how Alison feels than her mother, I think this also played a role in their relationship. I think that Alison's sexuality might also explain why she is so forgiving and unresentful towards her father. Alison may also be able to better understand Bruce and provides her with a deeper context of his actions.
ReplyDeleteI agree that although there is a shift in the tone/narration that, that doesn't necessarily mean she's unreliable. She is simply depicting the changes in her life, and with the people around her. Obviously with any story like this, the narration is going to be biased because, she is simply telling the story of her life from her POV.
ReplyDeleteAlison's lack of outrage surprised me, as if I was in her place I would be completely shocked and disturbed by this extreme secret, especially given the fact that Bruce's relationships were with minors. However, as a queer person herself, she had a sense of understanding that if she came of age during the time period that Bruce did, she may have done the same thing, which contributed to her lack of anger. Still, it did feel weird to me that she had almost no outrage, which did make me question her reliability as a narrator given this extreme bias.
ReplyDeleteYou thread this needle nicely: Alison is not an "unreliable" or deliberately misleading/biased narrator, but her story is necessarily contingent and speculative in a bunch of ways, and we assume that she is "honest" in her desire to unpack the truth about her father and family, and that she is representing the situation as she knows it as accurately as possible. One way to look at this is that--like Holden admitting to us that he lies compulsively, which serves to make him seem MORE honest when talking to us--she is honest and up-front about how much of her story is speculative and uncertain. In other words, if we get information that leads us to doubt her certainty about Bruce's suicide or the motives behind it, SHE is still the one telling us this stuff. She gives us reasons to question the accuracy of her story, and in a paradoxical way, that reflects her reliability as a narrator who is open about how her story might not even BE fully knowable.
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