Fun Home Panel

On page 120 of  Fun Home we see two significant panels that portray a sense of resemblance in Allison and her father.  The top panel shows a photo that is captioned as being Allison’s father.  Her father is defying the social normal, and instead of wearing a pair of swimming trunks, he is wearing a women’s bathing suit.   Allison describes him as elegant.   I feel like this was an important discovery in Allison’s eyes because it unveiled a bridge between her father and herself that she had never seen before.  In fact, she mentions earlier in the novel that she once begged to have swim trunks instead of a bathing suit at the beach.

In the second and largest panel, we see two pictures side by side, one of Allison’s father (age 22) and the other one of Allison (age 21).  The profound similarity between the two pictures stops Allison.  The setting of the photos, the way each of them smiles, the way they positioned themselves and the angle of the photos all seemed to show Allison a side of herself that resembled her father.  It was a side she hadn’t accounted for in the past.  I believe they make her take into account what was going on in her life at the time the picture was taken, and then try to relate to what her father may have been going through at the time of his picture.