Fun Home: Chapter 5 Summary & Analysis

Two nights before Bruce’s death, Alison dreamed that she was out at the family cabin with him. There was a beautiful sunset visible through the trees, and Alison urged Bruce to follow her up the hill to see it. At first Bruce ignored her, but she raced up the hill, and when Bruce finally got there the sun was gone. Alison says that Bruce possessed a type of radiance (perhaps, Alison notes, because of his excessive sunbathing habit), causing his death to have a “dimming” feeling. Alison’s cousin even delayed his annual fireworks show out of respect for Bruce.

Alison’s numbness, along with all the mourning at Bruce’s funeral was making her irritable. She wondered what would happen if she told someone at the funeral the truth—that there’s no mystery, and Bruce “killed himself because he was a manic-depressive, closeted fag and he couldn’t face living in this small-minded small town one more second.” Instead, Alison stays quiet. When Alison wonders how her father’s story might have turned out differently, she always thinks that if Bruce had been able to escape Beech Creek, he might not have died so soon.

Alison wonders if Beech Creek itself exerted some kind of gravitational pull due to its topography. The town is right on the Allegheny front, where the forests of the Allegheny Plateau break out into long ridges and cultivated valleys. “The Appalachian Ridges—many longer than Hadrian’s Wall—historically discouraged cultural exchange.” Alison’s Grammy was a Bechdel even before she married her grandfather. In their town of 800 people, 26 Bechdel families were still listed in the phone book, despite the fact that roads made it easy to navigate around the mountains by the time of Bruce’s childhood.

By the time Alison was born, one could even drive right across the mountain—Interstate 80 had just been blasted through a ridge close to Beech Creek. Over an image of Bruce and the kids playing cards on the porch, Alison narrates that the mountain deadened any hint of noise from the highway except on particularly hot, dry nights. She notes that the sun would rise over Bald Eagle Mountain each morning and set behind the “strip mine-pocked plateau” with beautiful splendor because of a “pre-clean air act paper mill ten miles away.” Similarly, Alison notes, the crystal-clear creek was so clean precisely because pollution from mine runoff left the water too acidic to support life.

In this fishless creek, Alison “learned firsthand that most elemental of all ironies. That, as Wallace Stevens put it... ‘Death is the Mother of Beauty.’” Alison was inspired to poetry by the beautiful surroundings, writing a poem about spring at the age of seven. She showed the poem to Bruce, who improvised a second stanza about flowers. Alison added Bruce’s lines to the typescript, and illustrated the page with a bright watercolor sunset. In the foreground of the watercolor stands a man staring out at the sunset. Alison notes that she never wrote another poem, and in her illustrating she soon abandoned the practice of using color.

In the Bechdel home there was a huge coloring book of E.H. Shepard’s illustrations for The Wind in the Willows. Bruce had read Alison bits of the story from the real version of the book, and Alison notes that in one scene the character Mr. Toad buys a caravan. One day, Alison was filling in the caravan with her favorite color, Midnight Blue. Bruce asked Alison what she was doing, since that was the “Canary colored caravan!” and proceeded to shade half of it in yellow and turn Alison’s blue half into shadow.

Helen’s talents were also “daunting.” Once, Alison went with Helen to a house where she argued with a man as if she knew him, which Alison later learned was called acting. Helen could also play piano very well, but when Alison one day asked her mother if “Chop-in” wrote chopsticks, Helen replied, “Sho-Pahn. No. Don’t bother me now.” Several years after Bruce’s death, Helen was using an old tape recorder to rehearse for the play Morning at Seven. When Helen checked to make sure it was recording properly, she realized she was taping over Bruce’s voice as he prepared a guided tour for a local historical museum.

Alison says that it was jarring to hear Bruce speak from beyond the grave, but the most shocking part about the tape was its evidence of both her parents separately absorbed in their work. Over an illustration of a young Alison telling her piano-playing mother that she’s hungry and Helen replying that she’ll make lunch in 15 minutes, Alison narrates that listening to the tape brings her to an emotional state of familiar resentment. Alison knows that it’s childish to begrudge her parents “the sustenance of their creative solitude… but it was all that sustained them, and thus was all-consuming.” Alison learned from her parents to feed her own creativity, for example by drawing on the walls. Her brothers quickly followed suit, so the Bechdel home became a sort of artists’ colony. They ate together, but were absorbed in separate pursuits. In this atmosphere, the Bechdel family’s creativity became compulsive.

Alison’s real “obsessive-compulsive disorder” first surfaced when she was ten. First it involved counting, like trying to get the bathtub faucet to stop after an even number of drips. She avoided odd numbers and multiples of thirteen, and crossing doorways became tedious since she had to count the number of edges she saw there. She also would continually wipe away invisible substances that hung in doorways. Despite her watchfulness, she encountered odd numbers and multiples of thirteen often, so she created even more rules. If she hadn’t successfully navigated a doorway, she could say an incantation, which could be repeated with added hand gestures. If Alison had a good day, she attempted to repeat as much of it as possible the next. If she had a bad day, she would alter her regimen slightly. “Life had become a laborious round of chores,” affecting even the order of how she undressed and how she lined up her shoes each night.

Every night, Alison had to kiss each of her stuffed animals before bed. Then she’d bring one of the three bears to bed with her, alternating nightly between the mother, father, and baby. Alison then points out that “no one had kissed” her goodnight in years. One day, Helen stopped Alison mid-ritual to ask whether Alison felt guilty about something. She asked if Alison had any bad thoughts about herself or Bruce, and Alison said “No” while wondering whether she had. Alison knew her mother had gotten her questions from Dr. Spock, who wrote a book called Baby and Child Care that Alison had also spent time browsing. Its section about compulsions came somewhat close to describing Alison’s symptoms.

Even so, Spock’s book’s explanation that compulsions are caused by “repressed hostility” didn’t make much sense to Alison. She continued reading, searching for a more concrete answer. Over images of Helen and Bruce arguing while a teen Alison reads Baby and Child Care, Alison narrates that she learned about “tics,” but these sorts of nervous habits described in the book were only child’s play compared to the darker fears that motivated Alison’s own rituals. Still, Alison liked reading Dr. Spock. She felt she was “both subject and object,” both the educator and the one being educated. Reading the book “was a self-soothing autistic loop.” Alison asks if her family was an artists’ colony, “could it not be even more accurately described as a mildly autistic colony?”

Over an image of a small radius encircling the areas where Bruce was born, lived, died, and was buried, Alison narrates that Bruce’s life “was a solipsistic circle of self, from autodidact to autocrat to autocide.” Alison then addressees her “own compulsive propensity to auto-biography.” At some point during her O.C.D. spell, Alison began to keep a diary in a wall calendar given to her by Bruce. Alison’s first entry was made on Ash Wednesday, and the first three words are in her father’s handwriting.

The entries in Alison’s diary proceeded blandly at first. She then switched to a date book, which afforded her more space. But in April, the phrase, “I Think” started to crop up between many of her comments. Alison says she was going through a kind of crisis of reality—How could she know that the things she was writing about were universally true? Alison believed she could only stand for her own perceptions, and her declarative sentences began to strike her as “hubristic at best, utter lies at worst.” The “I Thinks” became stitches between Alison’s sentences, and, to strengthen them, she would scribble “I think” over and over until the words became illegible blots. Alison’s diary then quickly became as tedious as the rest of her rituals.

At that point, Helen seems to have decided that giving Alison more attention might help her, so she began reading to Alison in the bath. But this was “too much, too late.” Alison was so consumed with anxiety that she couldn’t enjoy the reading and Helen would stop. Meanwhile, things worsened in her diary. To save time, Alison created a shorthand symbol for “I Think” that Alison began drawing right over names and pronouns. Then, Alison realized she could draw the shape over entire entries, which she did.

“Things were getting fairly illegible by August,” when Alison and her brothers went with Bill and Bruce to the Bullpen in the woods. Given how important that event is in Alison’s memory, her notes on the event in her diary are surprisingly minimal. There is no mention of the pin-up girl, the strip mine, or Bill’s .22 caliber gun—she only wrote, “we saw a snake,” with a curvy circumflex scribbled through “we.” Alison says that this again exhibits “the troubling gap between word and meaning.” At that time, Alison’s language skills couldn’t properly express the power of the experience.

Alison pauses her narrative to comment about how, when driving toward New York City on the highway, the speed at which you’re moving erases the details of the landscape itself. She notes how living in the anonymity of a city might have saved Bruce’s life, but adds that she can’t imagine her father having existed anywhere outside of Beech Creek. While listening to the museum-tour tape that Bruce recorded, Alison is stunned by her father’s thick Pennsylvania accent.

Alison had forgotten her father’s accent—by the time Bruce died, Alison had mostly succeeded in ridding herself of her own rural accent. However, Bruce’s accent and provincialism was planted deep. In Bruce’s letters to Helen during his courtship of her, Bruce wrote fondly about home and made plans to bring Helen to Beech Creek to meet his family. In the family’s Wind in the Willows Coloring Book, Alison’s favorite page was the map. There were distinct parallels between that fictional landscape and the one in Beech Creek. One on top of the other, Alison points out the similarities between the two towns, including that the creek of Beech Creek flowed in the same direction as Ratty’s River.

The best thing about the Wind in the Willows map was its ability to bridge “the symbolic and the real.” Though it was a chart, the map also served as an animated picture: if you look closely, you can see “Mr. Toad speeding along in the car he bought after becoming disenchanted with his canary-colored caravan.” In September of Alison’s O.C.D. year, there was a bad accident on Route 150 in which three people were killed close to where Bruce would die nine years later. It was the first time the “Fun home” hosted three funerals at once, and one of the victims was a distant cousin, a boy Alison’s age. Bruce told Alison the boy died from a broken neck. Alison’s diary entries from that weekend “are almost completely obscured” with curved “I Think” symbols.

On the Monday after the funeral, the writing in Alison’s journal shifted from her handwriting to her mother’s. For the next two months, Helen took dictation from Alison until Alison’s “penmanship” improved. Slowly, Alison did get better. She set deadlines on her calendar by which she had to abandon her compulsions, one at a time, interspersed with small encouragements like “Don’t worry. You’re safe.” Alison was “as obsessive in giving up the behaviors as” she’d been in pursuing them, but she still felt relief when they were gone. By the end of September, Alison narrated to her mother that she and Bruce watched a beautiful sunset together. Over an image of the father and daughter watching the sunset, Alison says that while Bruce once almost got into a fight with a guest “about whether a particular patch of embroidery was fuchsia or magenta,” this sunset left him silent.