Jenny Wu - Fun Home Blog

Looking at the panels on page 125 from the father's funeral, we can see the duality of Alison's life and conduct. Throughout the first five chapters,  we see her struggle. She battles her positive and negative feelings of her father and she battles her expected and demanded behaviors as a daughter and her internal desires. The first panel is what she wishes she could say at the funeral: the release of the secrets she holds for her father. Like her sexuality, personality, and individual expression, she restrains herself. She keeps the outside world from glimpsing into her private life and her family's truths. In the second panel, we see how she actually behaves when receiving condolences. Very little changes between both other than her expression and her words. The contrast of both shows how incompatible the two sides are. Alison is extremely out of sync with her environment and the people around her. The last panel of the page shows a newspaper article and the text emphasizes the geographical location of his death. This final piece shows the bare physical facts of the death. Here, we remove the emotional conflicting elements of his daughter and illustrate how dry the death truly was. Regardless of why he died or who he was, this last panel (plain text) is the fact. This is ultimately what happened. He is now passed on, and Alison's life, experiences, and emotions will continue.