"he was there to catch me when I leapt"
The last line of the Fun Home states, "But in the tricky reverse narration that impels our entwined stories, he was there to catch me when I leapt.
I found this line interesting - not only as a line to end on, which adds so much significance to it, but as a line to include at all - it takes her relationship with Bruce Bechdel from a very mixed bag of unpleasant childhood experiences and harsh realities of the adult world, to a perhaps not positive but at least consistent one that helped Alison as she changed. This got me thinking about the two of them - specifically, how he influenced the course of her life, and I started to understand the last line of the book to be, somewhat indirectly, true.
Alison's father's role as an antihero shaped her and her personality, often times by challenging her and her worldviews and being a force to push back against. His stifling personality was a tool Alison used to carve her own free and expressive character from. One instance of this is her rejection of femininity. This becomes a large part of her personality and her presentation, and it all started from her rebelling against her father's expectations for her as a young child. I believe that their power struggle defined and reinforced Alison's preferences, as her views on her femininity and masculinity may have been more neutral had she not had to force the issue.
As well as that, Bruce having feminine tendencies and interests likely also drove Alison to see outside of traditional gender norms and, again, search for the counter to her father's preferences. In an interview with The New York Times, Bechdel reveals that even her preference for cartooning over other forms of art stemmed from a rebellion against her father - she said, "I think I was drawn to cartooning because of the absence of color [...] It was such a rejection of the environment I grew up in, and my father had to aesthetic criteria for judging it" (https://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/03/garden/03bechdel.html).
Next, there is of course Alison's sexuality, which is perhaps the most closely intertwined with her father's of all of these examples. Her bold involvement with queer liberation movements in her adult life and her shameless expression of her homosexuality is as bold of a contrast to Bruce's shameful repression as can be, and I doubt that this is not connected to the larger pattern of her purposefully escaping and avoiding following in her father's footsteps.
To come back to the quote, I think in a way all of these examples are Bruce catching Alison as she leapt - he was consistently in the backdrop of her life as a deciding factor in so many of the most defining aspects of her personality, if mostly only to show her what she didn't want to do. He caught her as she leapt through adolescence and college and adult life, challenging her views and shaping her bold personality, and reassuring her that if nothing else, she was successfully diverging from his path.
This is a very interesting point! During class I was struggling a little bit with our classification of Bruce as an antihero, but I like your depiction of him as a sort of anti-role model for Alison. Even though Alison and bruce are similar in many ways (their rejection of tradition gender roles, sexuality, etc.), at the same time they are opposites of each other in almost every way. I think that may be why Alison feels so torn her father's death, because at the same time that she relates to him she also feels that they are always in opposition. So she can turn to him for support for their similarities (analysis of literature in college for example) but also feels miles away from the person he became at the end of his life.
ReplyDeleteThis is such a great analysis of the final scene!
ReplyDeleteI really loved that last line of the novel, "he was there to catch me when I leapt." I completely agree with your analysis, and I also think that it spectacularly sums up the entire story. Because Bruce had to “hurtle into the sea,” he was there to support Alison’s story when she “leapt.” Although there are still so many questions left unanswered in Fun Home, I think that this final line really is a solid conclusion to Alison’s story. Just earlier in the page, she acknowledges something that gave her uncertainty and confusion before: she’s not sure why he “hurtles” into the sea. However, in this concluding line, she shows how she is certain of her father’s effects and impact on her story, which is what the novel is truly about. Although there are so many ends left open, I think that this line is able to wrap up the story seamlessly and bring it to a great conclusion. I agree that this final line reasserts how Bruce shaped Alison’s story, which I think makes it a super awesome, powerful, and emotional ending phrase. Thanks!
I was definitely confused by this final line when I read it, but this analysis added a lot more substance to it from my perspective. It's so interesting how different yet similar Alison and Bruce are, but I think these similarities are what lead Alison to wanting to use Bruce as an anti-role model. For example, she and Bruce are both interested in literature, and this common interest provides a background that makes the differences in the way they enjoy/use/explore literature even more striking. For all that they have in common, Alison wants to make sure that she can at least explore those interests differently from her father. I think the way Bruce "hurtles" into the sea is, in a way, the epitome of the way he helped her leap—Bruce's death allowed Alison to finally flourish and be comfortable with her identity. This final line really does a good job of summing up Alison and Bruce's relationship and all the ideas expressed in the novel.
ReplyDeleteI was also confused by the final line, but your analysis really helped me understand what she meant. It's interesting how intertwined Alison and Bruce are, and how she views herself as the opposite of her father, but maybe also in a sense living the life her father couldn't live? She builds on her father's influences while also avoiding her father's mistakes, and it really highlights how Allison's "hero-ness" is built off Bruce's "anti-hero-ness".
ReplyDeleteYou make a great point with your analysis of "he was there to catch me when I leapt" because I originally thought it meant that Bruce was always holding her back and preventing her from really becoming her true self. This post shows that even though they have many similarities, Alison sees herself opposite of her father but she still recognizes that he shaped her to be who she is, which I think is a neat way of concluding this novel.
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