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The, Fun Home, By Alison Bechdel Essay

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Intertextuality troubles the definition of autobiography in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home. Fun Home is a retelling of Alison Bechdel’s life through the lens of her relationship with her father. However, because of what she considers to have been his suicide, Alison is left with an incomplete picture of who he was in life. By calling Fun Home an autobiography, Bechdel enters an autobiographical pact with the reader that ensures that what Bechdel is telling us is the truth. However, elements out of her control leave Bechdel unable to provide certain objective facts necessary to her narrative. As an attempt to remedy these absences and in turn maintain the validity of her story, Bechdel uses intertextuality to fill in the gaps of in her retelling. By overlaying masterplots of fictional narratives over her own, the reader is able to get at an understanding of the kind of person Alison’s father was. In this way Bechdel is able to reveal things about her father that she can 't prove to be true, but are reflective enough of his life to become true. Although only referred to as autobiography in paratext, Fun Home falls under the umbrella of narrative non fiction because it tells a true story. Abbott reinforces this in The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, stating that “…narrative non fiction differs from narrative fiction in its referential function. We expect it to convey as best it can the truth of actual events.” (146). This expectation means that when a narrative is presented

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