Fun Home: Intertextuality and Literature as an Equipment for Living to Understand the Figure of a Father

Abstract

Fun Home is an autobiographical comic written by Alison Bechdel, which focuses on her father, Bruce, a high school teacher who works at the family funeral parlour who is unable to come to terms with his own homosexuality. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to explore, through the use of intertextuality, how the author attempts to understand the true identity of her father and possible suicide, while at the same time trying to purify the relationship between them. To this end, Fun Home is divided into four different stories, of which only two of them will be analysed: the one in which the daughter discovers the father and the one in which the author atones for the father-daughter relationship. For the development of this study, a literary theory of Kenneth Burke will be used and applied to the three different diegetic levels in the comic.