Fun Home: A Real Life Example of the Absurd Paradox of Death Annelise Lipowitz College

Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home is a groundbreaking piece of literature in which an audience is able to experience an autobiographical piece unlike any other. Through the illustrations in this graphic novel as well as the utterly human words and concepts discussed by Bechdel, she is able to express her struggles with her family dynamic, her father’s secrecy, coming out, and living life as a woman and a lesbian. Throughout the piece, Bechdel covers many different themes and concepts, a few of which revolve around the typically heavy and touchy subject of death. However, when discussed by Bechdel, death is a routine sort of thing, something even to joke about. Bechdel and her peers even call the funeral home down the street where her grandmother and father work the “Fun Home”. Christian W. Schneider relates all of these ideas to their ties to the gothic themes presented in the “Fun Home itself throughout the graphic novel in the article “Young Daughter, Old Artificer: Constructing the Gothic Fun Home”. To Bechdel, death is an absurd concept much like life when described by Camus as well as simply just an absolutely ridiculous concept and therefore something not to be afraid of or to hold as a taboo of conversation, but rather something...