What I’d most like to do is analyze the story and its characters through a single quote from the beginning of the 3^rd chapter: “I’d been upstaged, demoted from protagonist in my own drama to comic relief in my parents’ tragedy.”

This quote reveals a great deal. The daughter begins, in attempt to liberate herself, with her own shocking revelation, but is interrupted, overshadowed, and upstaged with more important and an even more startling testimonial. I see Bruce’s story here; everything else is just a conscious or an unconscious reaction to the effect Bruce has had on the other characters in this book.

 Bechdel carefully inserts words like their ‘tragedy’ and  ‘family tragicomedy’ when describing her story, purposefully alluding to Greek mythology. Her father is the tragic hero, living with his very own tragic flaw. Daedalus becomes Bruce’s Greek counterpart. Easily, the most important comparison drawn would be his consummate skill as an artificer. It wasn’t a mere hobby. “Historical restoration wasn’t his job, it was his passion. And I mean passion in every sense of the word.” Underneath this quote is a picture of Bruce carrying a carefully crafted wooden post with UNCANNY resemblance to the picture of Jesus carrying his cross. Next to this picture, instead of words like ‘holy, pious, humble, gentle, I am dying for your sins,” Bruce’s descriptive words read ‘libidinal, manic, martyred.” His passion would ultimately lead to his demise. The author even describes with careful words her father’s remarkable ‘legerdemain,’ hinting that his ‘cunning artfulness’ was used to add an element of ‘cunning artfulness’ to his deception and trickery he had partaken in.  His family paid the price; they were neglected, playing secondary roles in his life, mere pawns. But he was a slave to his passion. “Daedalus, too, was indifferent to the human cost of his projects.”

           More important allusions come from literature reference. Literature apparently played a big role in this family, both parents being English teachers. The first book we see is Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. It’s my understanding that Tolstoy wrestles with some deep, existential themes, as he did in War and Peace, which I think may have been weighing on Bruce’s mind i.e. social change (the life he led opposed to his secret life), adultery (sex with boys), family life (did it make him happy?), and farming (artifice in Bruce’s case; Levin and fulfillment and happiness through work). Did he believe that reality was more like the work of a fiction writer? Clearly, the answer is possibly a maybe, if we examine his attachment to Camus. He highlights one line in the book he was reading prior to suicide: “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.” Camus argues the definition of absurd: ‘the universe is irrational and human life meaningless.”

          If he tangled with this notion before his death, that life is empty, meaningless, it’s no wonder he committed suicide. I believe he identifies with the characters of his books. The author even makes mention of his indulging in the works of Proust (also a homosexual) the year before he died. Being a funeral home director also may have added to the already volatile mix. “Maybe he felt that he’d become too inured to death,” Bechdel describes of her father, in his seemingly attempt to feel a reaction to death vicariously through her. So exposed to death and morbidity, living a life that was more or less meaningless altogether, and being a perfectionist with an inability to achieve fulfillment or gratification, Bruce made the decisions he did.