I would like to discuss here the purpose and rationale behind Alison Bechdel’s decision to illustrate her novel rather than simply leave the job of creating an image to the reader. There are a number of reasons for this interesting choice and I believe each furthers the main purpose which is telling the story of her father and herself over the years from childhood up and to her father’s death.
In most stories, at least it has been my experience, the author’s attempt to paint an image by using descriptive language and carving out a basic idea for a setting along with all the other intricacies of the tale and it is up to the reader to bring the story to life within them using their own experiences. This tactic enables each reader to have a potentially different experience from another when reading a story. However, in Bechdel’s case, by illustrating the story herself she takes away this task, or as I consider it an element of the story that makes the story, from the reader and institutes her own depictions of events.
As to why Bechdel would do such a thing, In my opinion it is because she does not want the reader to get the wrong impression of the way things were and fall into the illusions that her father created. She wanted to force the reader into viewing her father from her perspective in order to get a sense of who he really was. In this light, Bechdel’s decision to illustrate her story rather than simply write it makes more sense and is understandable however, with this method comes a degree of bias that will be hard to be able to look past. I wish that Bechdel would have made it easier for her readers to reach their own conclusions about her father rather than through her inevitable bias undoubtedly brought about due to her feelings of her father as distant during her childhood and even sometimes uncaring.
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