Why Alison's father did not kill himself.

Alison Bechdel is obsessed with her relationship with her father and his death.  In her memoir Fun Home she relates her conviction that her father’s death was not an accident but premeditated suicide opportunistically carried out with the help of a sunbeam truck.  However Alison proves through her memoir to be an unreliable narrator because of this the reader is left to conclude that her father’s death was not suicide despite Alison’s firm conviction.

Beginning with the overall structure of her memoir the reader will notice Alison’s convenient placement of literary allusions.  Throughout the memoir Alison likens he father to Daedalus.  As Daedalus her father was constantly in motion creating and redesigning “indifferent to the human cost of his projects” (11).  While it is possible that her life did handily line up with the stories of Icarus, Daedalus and Ulysses the seamless transition from life to literary allusion leaves the reader feeling the transition was too simple, too planned out.  The reference to her father as Daedalus continues until the last two pages of the memoir.  All this time she has convinced her reader that her father is Daedalus but now to suit her literary intentions she alludes to her father as Icarus.  Alison concludes that as Icarus was doomed to fall into the sea her father was doom to commit suicide from the beginning.  Alison is a talented writer who is able to draw connections between two seemingly unrelated topics but to do so it is very likely she tweaked events.  Like her father’s transformation from Daedalus to Icarus Alison may have customized events in order for the allusions and her life story to flow more smoothly.  This on its own is not enough to call her father’s suicide an accident but it does raise questions about her ability to convey an accurate story, as will the next paragraph.

The most condemning pieces of evidence as to why Alison is an unreliable narrator are provided by Alison herself.  Beginning on page 139 Alison’s father gives her a planner to recorder her day.  She begins by chronicling events in a very factual manner but by the next page she begins to doubt her recordings by including “I think” in her journal entries.  She writes; “How did I know that the things I was writing were absolutely, objectively true?”. (140)  Alison questions her ability as a narrator not in the panel which relates past event but in the margin.  This area is where Alison includes most of her reflections on past events.  For the reader this is one of the most solid pieces of evidence that Alison is an unreliable narrator simply because she identifies herself as one not in the panel but in the margin.  The second instance of Alison being an unreliable narrator centers on her period.  Although the event influences her description and interpretation of her years before college Alison herself is unsure of the order of events.  On the last page of the sixth chapter Alison admits using the margin that she was “only estimating that this episode took place in December.  There is no mention of it in my diary.”(186)  Not knowing when events occurred leaves events open to Alison’s reinterpretation for her memoir.  Like tweaking the story to fit her literary allusions Alison may this time unwittingly be reinterpreting events. 

Throughout her memoir Alison provides the reader with enough reason to suspect she is an unreliable narrator.  Both the transformation of her literary allusions and her inability to remember the order of events leaves Alison’s conclusions suspect.  Was her father really conspicuously “leaving A Happy Death around the house in what might be construed as a deliberate manner”? (27)  Alison could not possibly have known this because according to her memoir she was a way at college.  Again the reader is confronted by Alison’s haphazard story telling which leaves the reader wondering about her reliability as a narrator.  Moving on from Alison unreliable narration it is impossible to take her seriously when she concludes her father’s death was suicide.  Everyone else in the memoir believes it was an accident.  The snake her father saw was just a snake not a fabrication as Alison would have her readers believe.