Jason's Blog for University Laboratory High School Coming of Age Novel 2nd Semester 4th Period

Introduced halfway through Fun Home, Alison’s childhood diary serves as both a window to her past and her psyche. What begins as a simple record of daily life, meant to rid of her OCD, quickly spirals into an obsessive-compulsive ritual of recognizing and confronting her own reality. Alison becomes haunted by the fear that her written words are lies, that by simply stating "I went to the park," she is committing a lie because she cannot be 100% certain of the absolute, objective truth of the event. To cope, she begins inserting a small symbol (人) between her words to signify "I think,” in order to protect herself from being dishonest in her own narrative. As her anxiety grows, the symbols begin to take over her diary, in a sense rewriting what she knows about her past. Alison begins to draw huge versions of the symbol all over the paper in order to save time, physically obscuring what she even says in the first place. In the beginning she notes: “Then I realized I could ...

In the Amazon, as Esther lies in bed recovering from food poisoning, she picks up a magazine story which revolves around a fig tree. It’s a tale where a Jewish man and a nun meet under a tree, touching hands as they watch a bird hatch. When their relationship ends, and Esther comes to the end of the story, Esther draws a similarity between her relationship with Buddy Willard and the two characters of the story: “We had met together under our own imaginary fig-tree, and what we had seen wasn’t a bird coming out of an egg but a baby coming out of a woman, and then something awful happened and we went our separate ways.”(Plath 55) However, her version is already corrupted: the magazine story depicted new life emerging gently, whereas Buddy showed Esther a clinical and traumatic childbirth. In a sense, her “fig tree” was poisoned from the beginning. A couple of pages later into the story, as Esther sits in the UN building surrounded by people she perceives as genuinely talented, the fig tr...