Fun Home: Chapter 2 Summary & Analysis

Alison says that her father’s death was “his consummate artifice, his masterstroke,” because it was impossible to prove whether or not his death was suicide or an accident. There is, however, suggestive circumstantial evidence, like the fact that Helen asked Bruce for a divorce two weeks before his death, and also how Bruce had been reading and leaving around the house a copy of Albert Camus’s first novel, A Happy Death. Bruce left no suicide note, but in the book he highlighted one line: “He discovered the cruel paradox by which we always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love—first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.” Alison believes that quote to be an epitaph suitable to her parents’ marriage.

At the same time, Alison notes that before his death, the family couldn’t have perceived Bruce reading A Happy Death as a sign of desperation, because her dad was always reading something. For instance, five days before his death, Bruce also left a comment in a bird watching book he was reading—was that a sign that he was thinking of committing suicide? Then Alison wonders if maybe he just didn’t notice the truck that hit him because he was thinking about the divorce, before commenting that she doesn’t believe her dad’s death was an accident. The night after she returned home from college after his death, Alison and her mother discussed it, with Helen saying that she believes Bruce’s death was intentional. Bruce’s headstone is an obelisk, a shape Bruce was obsessed with because he saw it as symbolizing life.

Alison then notes that her father’s grave, the location where he died, Alison’s childhood home, and the farm where Bruce was born all exist within a radius of one and a half miles. Many of Bruce’s relatives displayed the same provincialism as Bruce did. Still, Alison is puzzled why her decorative-arts-obsessed father and aspiring actress mother decided to live in Beech Creek.

When Helen and Bruce were young, Helen flew to Europe to marry Bruce while he was in the army. They lived in West Germany for almost a year before Bruce’s father had a heart attack and Bruce had to return home to run the family business: a funeral home. Alison was born shortly after her parents returned to the U.S. After living at the funeral home for a short time, the Bechdels moved to a farmhouse and Alison’s brother Christian was born. Bruce began teaching high school English while working at the funeral home part-time. By the time the Bechdels moved to the gothic revival house and Alison’s youngest brother John was born, “Europe had disappeared” from her parents’ horizon entirely.

During this time, Alison begins to confuse her family with The Addams Family. She doesn’t understand that the cartoon is making fun of suburban conformity, because the lofty ceilings and menacing furnishings of the Addams house mirror the spaces of Alison’s own home. Also, Alison, in her first-grade school photo, wearing a black velvet dress her father squeezes her into, and looks eerily similar to Wednesday Addams. Helen bears a striking resemblance to Morticia. But, of course, what makes Alison relate most strongly to The Addams Family is the family funeral home business, and “the cavalier attitude” which she comes to take toward death.

Alison and her family called the funeral home the “Fun Home.” Alison’s Grammy lives in the front of the building, with the business in the back. Bruce is responsible for decorating the interior, so the rooms are hung with dark velvet drapery. Alison and her brothers have chores at the fun home, but they also manage to play and truly have fun there. They ride the folding chair trolley, mess around with the suction cup flags for sticking on the hoods of cars in a procession, and sniff the crushable smelling salt packets. When a new shipment of caskets arrive, the family lifts them with a winch into the showroom on the second floor of the garage.

Alison says that though there are never any dead people in the showroom, it still always feels like a mausoleum. The scent of cedar hangs in the air, and velvet drapes muffle any outside sounds. It isn’t somewhere you would want to be alone in, yet Alison and her brothers also often sleep over in the front area of the funeral home where her Grammy lives, and it isn’t scary.

As kids, Alison and her brothers would sometimes spend the night at Grammy’s. At bedtime, they would beg Grammy to tell them the same story over and over: The story of when Bruce, as a boy, got stuck in the mud. She recites: once, when Bruce was no more than three, he wandered off into a neighbors’ muddy field, and Bruce got stuck in the mud. Eventually, the neighborhood mailman, Mort DeHaas, came along and spotted Bruce way out there in the field. Alison and her brothers interrupt the story to ask what would have happened if the mailman hadn’t seen him. Would he have died? Grammy ignores the questions and finishes the story by saying that the mailman yanked Bruce out of the mud. Bruce’s shoes stayed stuck, but Bruce was fine. Alison tells this part of the story over an image of a milkman, not a mailman, lifting toddler-aged Bruce from the mud, and includes a note that she knows the man was a mailman but always pictured him as “a milkman, all in white—a reverse grim reaper.”

After that, Mort DeHaas brought Bruce back to Grammy’s kitchen, where she undressed him and then put him in the oven to dry off. Alison notes that she knew her Grammy was referring to a “cook-stove,” but all she could envision was the modern burning hot square oven Grammy had now.

The kids found the tale endlessly compelling, begging Grammy to tell it over and over before bed. By day, Alison has difficulty imagining her father naked, helpless, or put in an oven, though Alison notes that the way she once witnessed her Grammy forcefully help Bruce tie his surgical gown was “evocative” for her. In the funeral home, her father worked in the embalming room with the bodies, which Alison normally didn’t see before they were dressed and in a casket. But one day, Bruce called her back there to hand him a pair of surgical scissors, and she saw a dead, naked middle-aged man on the table. His genitals were shocking, but what really got Alison’s attention was his split-open chest.

Alison gave her father the scissors without emotion, and she narrates that the exchange felt to her like a test. She wonders if this is how Bruce’s own father showed Bruce his first cadaver, or whether Bruce felt like he’d become too used to death and wanted to elicit a reaction from Alison. Alison says that she herself has used this strategy of accessing emotion vicariously—for years after Bruce’s death, she would use the opportunity to tell people of his suicide in order to sense in her listener the grief that eluded her. Alison says the emotion she had suppressed for that gaping cadaver felt like it stayed suppressed even when her own father died. When Alison got the phone call about her father’s death, she bicycled back to her apartment from work, cried genuinely for about two minutes while hugging her girlfriend Joan, and that was it.

When Alison drove home to Pennsylvania the night of Bruce’s death, she and her little brother John “greeted each other with ghastly, uncontrollable grins.” Alison says it could be argued that death is inherently absurd in the sense that grinning isn’t an inappropriate response. She adds that perhaps Camus’s definition of absurd—“that the universe is irrational and human life meaningless” applies to her father’s death as well. In college, Alison had to read The Myth of Sisyphus, and Bruce offered to lend Alison his copy but she refused. She says she wishes she could say she’d accepted the book, still had it, and he’d underlined a revelatory passage.

Alison says it’s not that she thinks Bruce killed himself because of his existential angst—Camus’ conclusion in the book, after all, is that suicide is illogical. However, Alison suspects Bruce of being a lazy scholar. One snapshot of her dad lighting a cigarette in a sports car reminds Alison of old photos of Camus. Alison says it’s probably just the cigarette—Camus was rarely pictured without one, and since his lungs were full of holes from tuberculosis, “who was he to cast logical aspersions at suicide.” Camus couldn’t have lasted much longer if he hadn’t died in a car crash at 46, Alison notes. On various occasions, Camus is said to have told friends that dying in a car accident would be idiotic—yet in January 1960, while Alison’s parents were still living in Europe, Camus was in a car that crashed into two trees and he died.

In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus wrote that we all live as if we don’t know we’re going to die, “But then, he wasn’t a mortician.” Alison suspects that Bruce was all too enchanted by the idea of death. In the letters Bruce would write Alison at college he sometimes would play the “perfect absurd hero, Sisyphus shouldering his boulder with detached joy” in regard to his job at the funeral home. Other times, Bruce would be despairing and sad about his proximity to early death. Alison has no letters about the suicides Bruce dealt with, but she believes his proximity to suicide might well have impacted his choice to partake in it.

Alison says that you would think a childhood spent so close to death might have enabled her to grieve more quickly than others, but, in fact, all those years near graves and bodies only made Bruce’s death “more incomprehensible” to Alison. Alison finds the death of her undertaker father impossible and even paradoxical, and she notices that Bruce’s hair—well-kempt and styled during his life—looks thin on his lifeless body.

Alison is emotionless at the funeral, her sole emotion irritation when the funeral director touches Alison’s arm in consolation, causing her to shake it off with violence. This same irritation would overtake Alison for years afterward whenever she visited Bruce’s obelisk grave. One time, she found a cheesy armed services flag on top of Bruce’s grave, and hurled it into the nearby cornfield. Whether intentional or accidental, Bruce’s death was idiotic any way you looked at it, Alison narrates. Over two images of Alison first looking at the grave and then lying down next to it, Alison tells herself that her father is really down there, “Stuck in the mud for good this time.”