Use Of Obsessions In Alison Bechdel's Fun Home

Alphin describes a messy room which creates sympathy in the reader with visual imagery. This happens when “I look around at my half-made bed with its threadbare pillows exposed... open closet door... notebooks and papers and sports magazines scattered on my desk... loose T-shirts litter the carpet” (Alphin 125). This makes the reader feel bad for Brain since a messy room can be a sign of depression. Similarly, the author uses auditory imagery to create a feeling of being overwhelmed.

Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir, Fun Home, illustrates and depicts her unique upbringing. Her life story is told through her own illustrations, showing her internal conflict with who she is, as well as struggling to understand her father’s death. This unconventional way Bechdel chose to express her story positively affects the reader's comprehension of the novel. Being able to clearly see the situations creates more feelings of empathy towards the characters, and deeper connections are made. Reading about a situation, and actually seeing it are two very different things.

Fun Home by the American writer Alison Bechdel carried the themes of emotional abuse, sexual orientation, gender roles, suicide and the role of literature in understanding one’s family role. The tone and mode of Fun Home mainly describes it as a Tragi-Comic. At a young age, Alison always feels like she wants to dress like a boy, but later she discovers that she is lesbian and have more emotional attraction with women. She was shocked to knew that her father was engaged in sexual relationship with gardener and babysitter. The Fun Home started with a scene of the author herself as a young girl playing with her father.

The novel It Ends With Us by Colleen Hoover explores the destructive nature of obsession and suffering through the story of the main character Lily and her unhealthy relationship with her ex-boyfriend Ryle. The novel illustrates how obsession can lead to a loss of self-identity and control, causing harm not only to the obsessed person but also to those around them. Through the portrayal of the negative consequences of obsession, the novel serves as a cautionary tale about the dangers of losing oneself to another person and also illustrates how unhealthy relationships can be destructive and how past traumas can affect current and future relationships. The book shows how important it is to be aware of one's thoughts, feelings and behaviours

Alison Bechdel’s “Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic” is an enthralling memoir about a young girl’s peculiar childhood, which involved her family’s funeral business, infatuating trips, family turmoil, solitude, and her befuddling relationship with her masterful artificer of a father; in which similarities ranged from obsessive compulsive disorders and literature to sexuality. The most profound being homosexuality. Bechdel utilized duo-specific, speech bubbles, as well as, subject-to-subject paneling to illustrate the complex father-daughter relationship where Alison and Bruce Bechdel perpetually attempted to compensate for each other’s eccentric gender behaviors. Initially, both Bechdals yearned for different genders, imposing expected behaviors upon the other.

In Fun Home, Alison Bechdel uses images of her father’s distant relationship and obsessive behaviors which lead to the repression of her identity. Bruce, her father, represses his entire family with his obsession with perfection in his life, beginning with the renovation of their gothic home. Within that home, there is rigidity in keeping their home in a perfect state at the cost of Alison and her siblings’ freedom. When Bruce begins to fall apart, he begins to push his obsessive behaviors onto his daughter, restricting her expression of dress and identity. In Fun Home, Alison Bechdel showcases her father’s denial of his femininity as an explanation for living vicariously through his daughter, in ways that he cannot himself.

In order to live a normal life, these people do have their rituals it is not always a bad thing, in reality it could actually help with safety issues. If there is someone who washes their hands continuously at least you know they are clean and less likely to get sick. OCD does also includes obsessions over sexual or violent thoughts, even if that person does not mean to have those thoughts. “But people with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) feel the need to check things repeatedly, or have certain thoughts or perform routines and rituals over and over.” (National Institute of Mental Health)

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.

The parent or caregiver has to use the reward and consequence system for the entirety for the child’s childhood, promoting good behavior. VIII. Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, also known as ADHD or Hyperkinesia, has no known cause and affects a substantial amount of people in the U.S. The disorder effects how children and teens interact with each other and the child’s schoolwork and school performance.

The ^ symbol appears in Fun Home as a manifestation of Alison’s obsessive compulsive disorder, representing the phrase “I think.” Alison’s diary appears at numerous points in the novel, acting as a source and showing Bechdel’s thoughts at times in her life. After describing her OCD symptoms and use of ^, Bechdel notes, “my feeble language skills could not bear the weight of such a laden experience” (143). This line can be seen as reasoning for the author to create a graphic novel rather than a work solely with text. The ^ symbol represents Bechdel’s realization that words could not convey the entire meaning of her experiences.

This is explained with the help of psychoanalytic theory, which state that children want to please their parents. Those harsh upbringings brings them into a situation where they feel both love and hat towards their caregiers and those feelings result result in an inner conflict. The feelinge get hidden in the unconscious and have an influence later in life. They place them on other people, especially on those who are different or more vulnerable than

When reading an autobiography it is safe to assume that you are dealing with an unreliable narrator. This is the author’s story and no matter how objective they may try to be it will always be tainted with their own perspective of what happened since they were so close to the situations being described. So, one of the things someone writing an autobiography needs to be good at is tricking the audience into believing that their story is the truth. In Allison Bechdel’s graphic novel Fun Home, she uses a visual medium to help her accomplish this task.

They are obsessed the room, which has practially raised them, and have become addicted to what it can do.

Children with ADHD Attention Psychiatric Association says that up to 11% of children in the U.S have been diagnosed with ADHD. This is a concerning percentage considering the possibility for misdiagnosis. Many children have been misdiagnosed with ADHD due to parents being overwhelmed by their high energy children, Schools not questioning a misdiagnosis because they get more funding for a child with a mental handicap, and because doctors choose the easy way out when treating a child with high energy. The first reason why children are being misdiagnosed for ADHD because parents are being overwhelmed by their high energy children.

There are some people who go through obsessive phases where they become captivated with one particular thing. Then there are those like me who live with obsessive tendencies in many aspects of my life. Others find the obsession with creation. A deep uncontrollable desire to make art, music or literature. These are all examples of obsession.