Fun Home and Retrospective Time

The narrative of Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel Fun Home unfolds from many different points of orientation.  It is retrospective, with the speaker looking back on her father from the future point of his death.  However, within that timeline, the structure shifts between various perspectives. We move from Bechdel’s childhood to her father’s death, to her parent’s youth, to childhood once again, and the cycle continues in changing forms.  The timeline is linear in its realism, in that, as it is an autobiographical account of the author’s father, nothing truly happens out of place. Yet, the narrative is convoluted in its retelling. With the inherent retrospective storytelling, everything can happen at once simply because everything has already happened in the past.  Bechdel’s father is both alive and dead, and Bechdel herself is both adult and child. As a result of this, the past and future inform each other in ways that they would not during the actual present experience of an event. The future (or the newfound knowledge of the past, as seen at the moment of Bechdel’s discovery of her father’s relationships with men) colors past events in a light that forms an inextricable link between the various periods of time.

This simultaneous yet separate time is mirrored in the very structure of the graphic novel form.  The story is told through a series of boxes, the white spaces between denoting the movement of time.  Yet, the images themselves are stuck in it. It is impossible for them to move - each a snapshot, not unlike the ones frequently illustrated throughout the book.