The Workings of Human Memory

Fun Home and A Brown Girl Dreaming both deal with retrospective time as they string together pieces of memories into a cohesive understanding of their lives. While they communicate through entirely different mediums, a comic book versus a series of poems, both texts mimic the workings of the human memory works and show how humans perceive time.

In A Brown Girl Dreaming, Jacqueline reflects on events by recalling snippets of memory that have preceded such circumstances. By intermittently relating moments of the past to current events, Jacqueline suggests that history actively shapes life that comes after. She provides us with an image of her grandparent’s experiences that “run like rivers through [her] her veins” (Woodson 2). Jacqueline’s assertion that our actions and thoughts are partly preconditioned by past events incites an examination of the human memory. Why does our brain want us to remember certain situations rather than others? Why do these memories surface in midst of relatable situations?

The graphic novel, Fun home reflects on the workings of the human memory by presenting Alison’s life through a compilation of memory snippets. Alison does not follow chronological order; she presents scenes from her childhood and young adult hood as they appear relevant to the topic. For instance, when she recounts her father’s death she flashes back to her childhood and describes her experience with her father in the funeral home then she flashes forward to her teenage self-standing in front of his grave. This back and forth through time imitates the way our minds think about the past. When we are currently facing a situation, our mind seems to pull all the relevant memories regardless of their time of occurrence. Bechdel mimics the flood of memories we often experience by stringing together a multitude of memories.

Bechdel further mimics the stream of memory we experience, but providing illustrations of each scene. Unlike A Brown Girl Dreaming, Fun Home is a graphic novel that narrates through both words and pictures. This medium resembles the way that the human memory stores both images and communication from the past. While the mind also combines olfactory, gustatory, and tactile senses to construct more vivid memories, the graphic novel at least succeeds in utilizing visual and auditory senses to make Alison’s reflections of the past more vivid. Bechel uses images to show that senses play a large role in the way that human’s experiences and remember time.