The market is saturated with memoirs written in prose. Alison Bechdel, however, puts a spin on the dysfunctional family memoir in her graphic novel Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. By using the graphic novel narrative form, Bechdel tells the tale of her family tragedy through words and graphic images. Fun Home tells the story of young Alison’s life of dysfunction with a father who is a closeted gay man, a family that lives in isolation and her own struggle with anxiety and OCD. The chapter “The Canary-Colored Caravan of Death” focuses on her father’s death by suicide, and her own isolation and mental struggles. Much of Bechdel’s images in the graphic novel reference lightness and darkness; and she is able to use shading to continue the symbolism of light and dark that composed her life. Although her use of the graphic novel in some ways provides comic relief to her story, Bechdel's contrast between dark and light shading and language convey the tragedy of a family's emotional scarring and pain following years of dysfunction.
Even though Alison
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There are several panels where young Alison is watching the sun rises over Bald Eagle Mountain. On page 128 Bechdel discusses the irony of the “crystal clear” creek water that looks beautiful “precisely because it was polluted.” This creek can be seen as a metaphor representing the entire Bechdel family and how they might even be, “too acidic to support life of any kind.” In the first panel on page 129, the graphic weight of Alison’s shadow in the “fishless creek” makes her appear flat and dark as she thinks of a line from her mom’s favorite poem, “Death is the mother of beauty.” The language and the shading in these two panels reveal the contrast of life and death and the tragedy behind Bechdel’s story. As a result of the graphic weight added to these two panels, the reader is able to understand how darkness overtook Bechdel’s
Even to this day, shame about one’s sexual orientation remains a prominent topic. Whether one identified themselves as gay, lesbian, and transgender, society viewed them and their actions as a sin, a crime, and a disease, which only increased the amount of shame–a painful feeling of distress or humiliation caused by the consciousness of wrong or fooling behavior–they saw within themselves. Then changes began to occur as a group of gays, lesbians, and transgender people confronted police in an event known as the Stonewall Riots or the Stonewall Uprising, which became a turning point for gay liberation. Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home is a 1980s, family tragicomic-graphic memoir that addresses this perspective turning point through the use of the labyrinth
Chad Blenz Deniz Perin ENG 121 08 December 2014 Published in 2006, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic is a graphic memoir that brought great success to Alison Bechdel and her work. Fun Home explores the relationship between Alison and her homosexual father, Bruce Bechdel, to shed light on ideas such as gender, coming out with your sexuality, and the complex dynamics within their family. With further analysis we can see that these key ideas are facilitated through discussions of death, life, and literature–provoked by Alison’s efforts to illustrate a truthful portrait of her complicated connection with her father, specifically after he commits suicide. Alison Bechdel is not only the main author and narrator but also the main protagonist through out the graphic memoir.
The short story, The Yellow Wallpaper, written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is a brilliant piece of fictional literature. The tale involves a mentally ill woman who is kept in a hideous, yellow room under the orders of her husband, John, who is a physician. The ill woman is conflicted due to the fact that the horrifying yellow wallpaper in the room is trapping a woman who she must help escape, but the sick woman is aware that she must get better in order to leave the terrifying, yellow room. The setting and personification applied in the short story, The Yellow Wallpaper, allows readers to develop an understanding of the sickness of the main character faces.
In “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the female narrator is greatly troubled by the suppression of her imagination by her husband and her ultimate isolation due to this subordination. These feelings are reflected through the author’s use of setting as the narrator’s dreary and malicious descriptions of the house and the wallpaper mirrors her emotional position. Throughout the reading, the reader is exposed to the narrator’s in-depth loss of touch with reality as she sinks further and further into her own reality. As she becomes more isolated, her descriptions of the house become more abstract as she begins to focus on the wallpaper and starts to see herself as being hidden behind it.
In the eyes of Aristotle, there are three modes of persuasion in order to successfully persuade the reader. These three modes are ethos, which deals with the character of the author, pathos, which deals with the emotional influence of the author on the speaker, and logos, which deals with the the author’s appeal to logical reasoning. Paul Bogard utilizes ethos, pathos, and logos in order to effectively build an argument persuading the audience against the world’s growing reliance on artificial light in his article “Let There be Dark.” Bogard is able to establish his credibility and put himself in the audience's good graces through a short personal anecdote. Next, he puts the audience in a good emotional state with his appealing word connotation.
It is evident that change is a natural component in the average person’s life. Some however, are more drastic than others. This is exhibited through the first-person narrator of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story, “The Yellow Wall Paper”, who undergoes a drastic change in her health due to postpartum depression, her relationships with the individuals around her, and her isolation. These changes later develop an internal conflict in the form of a troubling identity plight.
Ray Bradbury’s, The Whole Town’s sleeping, is about a woman Lavinia Nebbs, who is going to the theatre with her 2 friends, Francine and Helen. On their way, they find a dead body, which was their other friend Eliza Ramsell’s. Assuming it was the anonymous serial killer, nicknamed “The Lonely One”, they call the police. After the theatre trip, the friends head home. However, Lavinia senses someone is following her.
Rhetorical Analysis of Shooting Dad The story “Shooting Dad” by Sarah Vowell discusses a story about a teenage girl and her relationship with her father and how they are constantly clashing with each other because they are almost exact opposites. The author develops her story by creating images in the reader 's mind to describe events that happened in her life, the use hyperbole for comedic relief, and irony for emotional effect. The use of these emotional strategies is effective because Vowell is able to use these strategies to help the readers understand the relationship between her and her father. Overall by the use of strategies like imagery, hyperbole, and irony the author creates a piece of writing that shows the relationship between the main character and her father.
The imagery had much light and childishness to it. With images such as “it seemed to Myop as she skipped lightly from her house to pigpen to smokehouse that the days had never been as beautiful as these”. As well as having lines such as “she felt light and good in the warm sun”, and “She struck out at random at chickens she liked” to create the feeling of child hood innocence, using all of this light to mean goodness and being unaffected by the harshness of reality. However she also uses the imagery later to show the loss of innocence when she describes everything as darker, when she starts using lines such as “it seemed gloomy in the little clove she found herself in” and “all his cloths had rotted away”. Alice walker is using this imagery to convey that the innocence has been lost at this point, taken by the harshness of reality and death.
The short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a story full of imaginative symbolism and descriptive settings. However, without the narrator’s unique point of view and how it affects her perception of her environment, the story would fail to inform the reader of the narrator’s emotional plummet. The gothic function of the short story is to allow the reader to be with the narrator as she gradually loses her sanity and the point of view of the narrator is key in ensuring the reader has an understanding of the narrator’s emotional and mental state throughout the story. It’s clear from the beginning of the story that the narrator’s point of view greatly differs from that of her husband’s and other family in her life.
The house is in a super-isolated place. The house represents the narrator 's personal emotions; restricted and isolation. In the story, “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the symbolism of the the wallpaper and the diary demonstrate the psychological difficulties, that were caused by being disrespected and thought less of, during the 19th century for women across the United States. In the “Yellow Wallpaper”, the woman 's husband John neglects her symptoms of postpartum and says she has a slight hysterical tendency.
On of the greatest examples of imagery that Alice Walker uses is the one that compares light and darkness. At the beguining of the story the author mentions delicate and calm setting of a farm. In creating this imagery the reader is able to understand that all the positive and upbeat words are associated with the farm setting. Myop’s light-hearted innocence is also shown when “watching the tiny white bubbles disrupt the thin black scale”. The effective description provides credibility to the environment, and makes the later events all the more shocking,
The Holocaust, death, and sexual identity are three very deep and profound subjects, and the comic medium helps bring these topics to life. No longer is the comic the silly humor on the back of your newspaper. Before comics used to be a form of cheap, low-class art. Spiegelman and Bechdel show that comics are even more complex than the most sophisticated high-class art. The graphic novel is a powerful literary weapon that helps authors explain the complicated and subtle nuances that are crucial to the greater story.
In her novel, The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan focuses on the fact that the bond between a mother and daughter can overcome any ethnic barrier. Despite there being many disagreements and arguments about the ways to live their lives, Tan defies this issue by creating a bond that is unbreakable even though the experienced different upbringings. Certain disagreements keep the novel interesting and create a conflict depicting the problems stemming from this barrier. Through her use of similes, metaphors, and flashbacks, Tan shows how the bond between a mother and daughter can withstand even the strongest cultural differences.
Both “Speaking of Courage” by Tim O’Brien and “Soldier’s Home” by Ernest Hemingway use the townspeople as a symbol for how society treats soldiers. The authors show this symbolism by how the townspeople treat the soldiers, how the soldiers treat girls, and how the soldiers treat the townspeople over time. The symbolism in this story gives a message to the reader to treat soldiers with respect, and not just ignore them because their story is boring or uncomfortable. In “Soldier’s Home,” Krebs’ town is one which “has heard too many atrocity stories to be thrilled by actualities” (84).