The Intellectualization of Generation X Writers

Allison Bechdel is a senior representative of generation X; she, as many writers of her age and range, is subject to exalted intellectualization. The book is full of quotes and allusions to works of English and American prose, especially the first half of the XX century. Especially, this book is dedicated to the formation of the personality and what influences this process.

'Fun Home' is an autobiography written by Allison Bechdel and published in 2006. In fact, Bechdel's children called 'Fun Home' the funeral home where their family worked.

The grim irony of the name is that the cold of the funeral home cannot be compared with the atmosphere in their home. The comic tells how Alison grew up and matured in a family with an emotionally cold father and a distant mother, how she realized and accepted homosexuality, how she experienced her father's death, what she thought of him in childhood and in her youth, and how she perceives her father now.

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The theme of the relationship with the father is the main one in the book, because, according to Bechdel, his influence was decisive at all stages of its development.

As in any autobiography, the events described are not simply listed, but lined up in a single linked chain, saturated with experiences and acquiring subjective significance for the author. To describe life, Bechdel chooses a non-linear narrative model. Each of the seven chapters of the book is a complete story, and inside the chapter, Alison can either return to her childhood or describe herself in a conscious age to illustrate the main idea.

At the same time, in general, the chapters cover Bechdel 's life from 5 to 19 years, from the moment of the first sensation of the conflict between the inner self-perception and the father's demands on her appearance to the suicide of the parent and self-disclosure as lesbians. As any graphic novel, it is consigned to either the text or the illustrations - everything in it works organically. Turning photographs, documents, images from childhood and the figments of imagination into drawings, Bechdel places them in one context in a way that the author of prose or documentary films cannot.

The novel consists of a dense and non-linear flow of recollections in which views of life and death are mixed (the specifics of her father's work are reflected in his family's sarcastic attitude to this topic), family everyday life and moments that 'begin to speak' only after many years when you look from the perspective of the experience they have lived through, they can be traced to the stages of self-identification and discovery of the world, reflecting a large layer of the subculture of the LGBT community of the seventies and eighties. The most important role is played here by books: for the heroes, their reading and analysis is simultaneously one of the forms of escapism and the search for excuses in the lives of the 'classics', who prove that the subject of 'otherness' was close to them and found a place in their works.

While Alison is building piles of feminist 'militants' and essays on homosexuality (doing this deliberately, turning the spines to the reader with the obvious desire that they should pay attention to them), her father builds his odyssey through the pages of Proust and Camus's novels, Hemingway and Joyce, Wilde, and Millette, passing this baton of 'self-searching' to a daughter, who contributes diary, clumsy notes, notes on personal crises and experiences to the hypertext of 'Fun Home'. The 'Fun Home' in places (filled with clippings from books and dictionaries) draws on a culturological study, but more often it represents a frank confession, which takes the form of a 'history of growing up' not limited to the chosen topics: the memory throws heroine not only reflections on childhood, grandmother's stories and faded photos, but also moments of puberty, memories of the first menstruation, sexual experience and other "personal" things.

To add, children patiently watch the complex relationships of parents, all the time, as if staying at a distance from each other, demolish the complex nature of the father, the handyman, the lover of flowers and the owner of barely noticeable cherished traits in behavior that reveal the hidden gay in him - and this is already forced to endure himself, hiding behind the screen of the family, which he equally or sincerely loves, or simply uses as a defense against public censure. How equally likely is the fact that he committed suicide and that he died in an accident, from which Alison began his attempts to get to know this person better.

Moreover, Alison is also 'not like everyone else' and once she realizes that she loves women and in general has always tried to be the opposite of her father, responding to his love for beautiful things with rude features and chosen clothes, challenging him with her behavior. 'Fun Home' pretends to be a collection of evidence, which contains book quotes, personal diaries, family photos, love letters and geographical schemes. And Bechdel uses this collection to discover what she really feels about her father. The peculiarity of Bechdel language can also be called capacity, restraint and as if understatement. So Bechdel collects his suitcase of memories, but leaves a little room for reflection in it, albeit in large part for his own.

What is more, heroes explore contemporary culture and their lives, trying to understand who they really are. It is noticeable that it is easier and safer for the younger generation to make a recognition of themselves and others than the 'older ones' - and for Bechdel it is a clear victory, although she does not scream about it at every step. She extracts this topic from the 'taboo' section and puts it into the 'personal' section, feel the difference. Sometimes, of course, it's hard to understand why people have to go to all this in order to realize their right to be themselves. And sometimes it seems that they consciously choose homosexuality as a manifestation of some kind of 'elitism', involvement in something important and relevant, and this is what leads to problems and stress, as Alison describes, and not the majority rejection. Sometimes it seems that heroes with such zeal seek out the 'context' in books and in general in mass culture, which, in search of 'justification', should lead them to at least complicated relations between Tom and Jerry and other more obvious examples.

Alison sees herself as the complete opposite of her father and she always tries to emphasize his masculinity, although her father always warned her against it. The rest of the novel is devoted to the discovery and study of her sexual orientation. Everyone knows that the family is the most important place in the education and development of the individual. A child from an early age will take from the family in which he grew up, he will, at a subconscious level, remember and store in his memory throughout his life. The significance of the family lies in the fact that it is at home that the worldview and attitude to the world, the lifestyle, habits and social existence of the child are formed.

Modern families are quite diverse, and depending on how life is built and communication with parents, the formation of the child's personality depends. First, the future character and temperament of the child, the foundations of the formation of culture, personal hygiene, daily routine, and much more are laid in the family. Then, depending on the well-being, lifestyle of parents, communication and relationships among themselves, the family can influence the child both positively and negatively. The effectiveness of raising a child depends on how parents were able to create the right conditions. A strong and strong family foundation, based on love for the child, a guarantee that the child will grow up a harmonious, successful and confident person in the family. After all, nothing so inspires, gives confidence and strength as the devotion, care, attention and love of parents. If peace, peace and tranquility reign at home, a peaceful and sincere atmosphere, the child will undoubtedly grow sensitive, open, calm and balanced.

'Fun Home' has earned a lot of enthusiastic reviews, some of them are on the back cover page. The topic of 'sexual identification' still prevails here, and it does not always allow us to call the history of a universal, able to reach readers of both sexes and different orientations - if the author didn't fix herself on LGBT philosophy, 'Fun Home' would fit well into the line of great generational novels, helping to understand and continue the thread linking "fathers and children".