Alison Bechdel's graphic memoir, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, documents the author's discovery of her own and her father's homosexuality. The book addresses many themes, including but not limited to: sexual orientation, family relationships, and suicide. Unlike most autobiographical works, Bechdel uses the graphic medium of comics to tell his story through reading. carefully or by carefully analyzing pages fourteen through seventeen of Fun Home. understanding how a Bechdel uses words and graphic devices to render specific events One can also see how the specific content of the pages connects thematically to the. book as a whole As we will see, this part of the book echoes the strained relationship between Bruce Bechdel and his family and his attempts to conceal his homosexuality by creating an image of an ideal family, themes which predominate. in the rest of the area. Let's begin by examining page fourteen panel by panel, starting with the panel itself and the illustrations within it. the panel. As we can see, the author elongated the panel to fit the width of the page. This was probably done to fit the entire scene into the panel and to indicate that the scene probably spans more than 30 seconds. Looking at the illustrations of the setting and characters, we can say that Bechdel stays towards the middle of the realism/abstraction scale, meaning that the images are neither too abstract nor photorealistic. Lines are used to show features such as the hair of all family members and the father's pants. Lines are also used to represent the shiny surfaces of the cabinet on the left and the mirror directly above. The use of figures and three-dimensional objects created...... middle of paper ...... ideas on pages sixteen and seventeen. When you read a small segment closely, you realize the vast amount of information that can be said about that segment alone. In this case, it was only four pages of Fun Home, and each page seemed to have a life of its own. Page 14 discussed the relationship between Bruce Bechdel and his family, while page fifteen gave an overview of the father-daughter relationship. Then pages 16 and 17 dealt with hidden truths and the creation of false appearances. Then there were the literary and graphic devices: the heavy use of line, the use of gray shading, stretched versus compact panels, interdependent word-image relationships, and so on. The clear illustrations and relatively simple prose made the process a little easier. , but this opinion might have been different if the process involved close reading of the entire book..