Fun Home: An Ouroboros

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.