Both Fun Home, by Alison Bechdel, and We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, by Karen Jay Fowler, are written in the first person. This allows the readers to get a deeper insight of the main characters’ perspective of the world. Similarly, they both analyze their families, in which the father is constantly the focus, although this is truer regarding Bechdel’s novel. The authors explore the similarities the main characters share with their fathers, as well as the controversies, conflicts, and preconceptions they face every day.
In Fowler’s novel, the main character is a girl named Rosemary Cooke. She has a very unique sibling, a chimpanzee named Fern, who highly influenced Rosemary’s early development, at the same rate that she influenced Fern’s. …show more content…
Fun Home is Alison Bechdel’s autobiography in the format of a graphic novel, and, in it, she portrays her life, from her childhood to her young adulthood, and her family, which was composed of her parents and her two brothers. The first chapter describes her father’s personality and his passion for architecture, interior design and landscaping, although that wasn’t his profession. He completely remodeled the house in which Alison spent her youth, giving the impression that it was an extravagant house, something that Alison disliked. His obsession with remodeling, however, was at the cost of his relationship with his family, since he showed himself as authoritative and emotionally unavailable, often regarding his creations as more important than his own children, which he mistreated at times. Alison explains how she “grew to resent the way [her] father treated his furniture like children, and his children like furniture” (Bechdel 14). Her father’s behaviors made Alison become the complete opposite of him in some aspects of her personality, which is confirmed when she states that, “[she] was Spartan to [her] father’s Athenian. Modern to his Victorian. Butch to his nelly. Utilitarian to his aesthete” (Bechdel