Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

In, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel, the relationship between Alison and her father, Bruce Bechdel, is something Bechdel made stand out right from the beginning of the graphic novel. Right on the first two pages, Bechdel brings up the Greek character Icarus. She relates Icarus to her father. Throughout the graphic novel, the relationship between Alison and Bruce fluctuate. Understanding the term character, In the story of Icarus, Icarus’s father, Daedalus, made a pair of wax wings for Icarus. Daedalus told Icarus to not fly too low or too high, because if he flew too low, the water will cause the wings to break, and if he flew too high, the sun will melt the wax. Icarus listened to his father for a while, but then he strayed from Daedalus’ instructions. Icarus decides to fly high into the sky. When Icarus got too high, the wax began to melt as Daedalus warned Icarus before. When enough of the wax melted, Icarus crashed into the sea and died. Bechdel used that story as an analogy between her father and Icarus. “In our particular reenactment of this mythic
In the beginning of the graphic novel, she starts off by confusing the readers of why her father is viewed as Icarus. Later on in the story, Alison is showing that she is confused on who was actually the father. With that being thought about it can relate back to the Icarus story and relate her father to being the child Icarus. At the end of the story, Bechdel relates it all back to the story of Icarus, and the truck that her father may have jumped out in front of to kill himself. As one can see, understanding the term character, to analyze how each character acts and thinks, can better the understanding of what Bechdel was trying to get across to the reader about the story of Icarus and how it relates to herself and her