Fun
Home: An Ouroboros
An ouroboros is often depicted as a snake eating its
own tail. It’s representative of self-reflection and cyclicality, showing a
cycle or constant recreation of its self. The novel Fun Home can be seen as an ouroboros and Alison’s telling of her
story can be too.
Alison and her father are in the same cycle of self-discovery
and Alison is constantly recreating herself and her father in the graphic
novel. She depicts the same events with different details that make the reader view
it in a new light. She tells the story of her father’s death multiple times and
it never becomes clear if it was a suicide or an accident, because it is
constantly recreated with a different intention.
In a way, Alison and her father are each other’s
ouroboros. Her father was trying to make Alison girly and dress her in frilly clothes,
perhaps to recreate what he wanted for himself through her or to recreate her
to not turn out gay like he did. Similarly Alison tries to make her dad more
masculine to depict her desire to me masculine. This is shown when Alison and
her father are looking through a magazine and Alison picks out a suit for her
dad because it is what she would want for herself. Her father tries to make her
wear a string of pearls that he picked out and liked.
The last ouroboros in the book takes place on pages
220 and 221. Alison and her father have come full circle and talking about how
they are similar. Alison is a recreation of her father and they start a new
point in their relationship (though short lived due to his death). Alison’s
relationship with her father was constantly changing and evolving, with each
new event in her life, her view of her father and Alison as a person was
changed.
