The Great Gatsby's Relationship With Her Father
In the graphic memoir Fun Home, Alison Bechdel records her unusual relationship with her late father Bruce Bechdel and reveals her family secrets. Throughout Chapter Three, she speculates about the cause of her father’s death after first knowing this catastrophe and makes a comparison between F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous character Jay Gatsby and her father. In this allusion, Bechdel highlights the deep influence of Fitzgerald on her father, in that Bruce was fascinated by Fitzgerald’s lifestyle and sentiment. She then shifts to the parallel between her father and Fitzgerald’s renowned character Gatsby. Later Bechdel realizes that these three people all died in the same month and week, and wonders if her father’s death is a suicide caused by
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Bechdel writes that like Gatsby, her father fueled and promoted the transformation by his “colossal vitality of illusion” (64). This description exhibits her father’s deep and massive devotion to illusion, and such faith of unrealistic life serves as the energy to support her father to live on. Bruce Bechdel also sincerely believes in the fictitious world and the imagined self, behaving as the fictional wealthy character Gatsby with “noblesse oblige” that as a rich man he should be generous to the poor (64). Similar to Gatsby, Bruce applied the transformation through every detail of life. Unlike other upstarts who only care about the overall decorations of their newly purchased mansion in order to show their wealth, Gatsby even embellishes the inner part of his library by putting real volumes instead of fake cardboards in it. Likewise, Bruce places real books that have clearly been read on his shelf. Their choice of books on the shelves signifies the similarities between them, that they both prefer “a fiction to reality” since they constructed the imagined life so carefully and in detail (85). However, in the book The Great Gatsby, the person who discovers the fact of those volumes hails the deed of putting real books as “realism” (Fitzgerald, as quoted in Bechdel 84). The genuine preference of the fictional world is satirized because the unreal is built up by real
Bechdel writes that like Gatsby, her father fueled and promoted the transformation by his “colossal vitality of illusion” (64). This description exhibits her father’s deep and massive devotion to illusion, and such faith of unrealistic life serves as the energy to support her father to live on. Bruce Bechdel also sincerely believes in the fictitious world and the imagined self, behaving as the fictional wealthy character Gatsby with “noblesse oblige” that as a rich man he should be generous to the poor (64). Similar to Gatsby, Bruce applied the transformation through every detail of life. Unlike other upstarts who only care about the overall decorations of their newly purchased mansion in order to show their wealth, Gatsby even embellishes the inner part of his library by putting real volumes instead of fake cardboards in it. Likewise, Bruce places real books that have clearly been read on his shelf. Their choice of books on the shelves signifies the similarities between them, that they both prefer “a fiction to reality” since they constructed the imagined life so carefully and in detail (85). However, in the book The Great Gatsby, the person who discovers the fact of those volumes hails the deed of putting real books as “realism” (Fitzgerald, as quoted in Bechdel 84). The genuine preference of the fictional world is satirized because the unreal is built up by real