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Throughout this section, Bechdel uses color to articulate the ways Bruce influences her perception of reality. “The Canary-Colored Caravan of Death” begins with a dream Alison has just before Bruce dies, in which she is gazing at a vibrant sunset, eager for him to join her, but he’s late and misses it. This is juxtaposed with a scene from her childhood, in which Alison is using her favorite color, midnight blue, to color in the caravan from her The Wind in the Willows coloring book. Bruce interrupts and takes over, saying the caravan is canary, coloring it yellow to make it conform to his expectations. He similarly takes over when Alison writes a poem. Alison is so cowed by the tyranny of his perspective that she abandons poetry and even color itself. This act of abandonment is visually emphasized in the memoir, which is monochromatic and uses only black and blues. In another scene, Bechdel depicts a sunset that she shares with Bruce, the caption describing the salmon and canary colors but the panel depicting it only in monochrome. In this way, Bechdel rebels against her father’s interpretation and makes both the moment and her memory of it her own by using her favorite color, blue.

Read an in-depth analysis of Alison Bechdel’s role within Fun Home.

This section is also concerned with how inexpressible reality can be. In the face of Bruce’s relentless need to fictionalize his life, Alison develops what she describes as a “compulsive propensity to autobiography,” starting with her young diaries and evolving into Fun Home itself. However, in her earliest forays into writing about her lived experience, Alison struggles to claim her reality, questioning the objectivity of what she writes at every juncture. She begins to mark up her diaries, first with “I think” and then with a symbol she invents that carries the same meaning, until her entries become nearly illegible. This act illustrates (literally and figuratively) how young Alison’s doubt obscures her ability to express her reality. Bechdel’s early diaries also fall short in the face of monumental experiences. For example, a trip in which Alison pretends to be a boy, shoots a gun, and sees a snake, which she explores in vivid, meaningful language and imagery in Fun Home, is communicated in that day’s diary entry with a single sentence about the snake. Through the act of writing her memoir, Bechdel represents her reality in a way that was not accessible to her as a child.

Read an important quote about Alison’s trip and its relation to language and imagery.

Bechdel also explores how simultaneously necessary and alienating secrecy can be. Secrecy is often necessary in Fun Home because honesty may, in some way, violate perceived social norms. When Alison is at Bruce’s funeral, she imagines what it would be like to tell the full truth to the people gathered there: that her father killed himself because he was a sexual predator and a closeted gay man in an oppressive town. However, saying this aloud would not only violate Bruce’s wishes but would also violate social expectations in the town she grew up in. In some ways, Alison struggles her whole life to articulate the truth and, when she isn’t able to, it often comes out in unspoken ways, such as in anxiety, obsessions, and compulsions. Both Bechdel and Helen draw a connection between the unspoken and Alison’s obsessive-compulsive disorder. Helen wonders if Alison is harboring unspoken guilt, and Bechdel suggests that one of her compulsions (showing equal tenderness to each of her stuffed animals) expresses a need for affection that went unmet in her emotionally distant household. 

Bechdel expresses a complex relationship to creativity and beauty, finding both self-expression and isolation in creative work, both solace and death within beauty. Bechdel describes her experience of communing with beauty in sunsets and in the waters around her childhood home. At the same time, she notes that what makes the skies and rivers so beautiful is pollution, quoting Helen’s favorite Wallace Stevens poem, which says that “Death is the mother of beauty.” Bechdel sees similar complexity in her relationship to her own creative work. She describes how, as she is growing up, each of the Bechdels retreat into their own creative pursuits. While this gives each member of the family sustenance and creative solitude, it also keeps them isolated from each other. Alison is jealous of the way her parents’ artistic interests take them away from her and observes that there’s something compulsive about each of their individual pursuits, as though they are trying to compensate for something essential that their family otherwise lacks.

Read an explanation of an important quote about art and family estrangement.

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