After our discussion of intertextuality and its function in Fun Home in class on Monday, I found the segments of chapter five and six in which Bechdel talks about her journal entries particularly interesting. She includes the entries to reveal both the extent of her obsessive compulsive disorder and her resulting “epistemological crisis” (141) as she realizes that “all [she] could speak for was [her] own perceptions, and perhaps not even that.” (141) The passages develop her character within the narrative while raising questions as to how her character is developed by the narrative and whether it can be reliable. Bechdel as narrator does appear reliable in how she relates the past — regarding her diary entry on a camping trip, she notes that “considering the profound psychic impact of the adventure, my notes on it are surprisingly cursory” (143) and later that her journal “was no longer the utterly reliable document it had been in my youth.” (162) But the passages also have clear metanarrative implications, with Fun Home itself as another example of autobiography that could demonstrate “the troubling gap between word and meaning” (143) and “could not bear the weight of such a laden experience,” (143) and so they raise questions as to how we read the novel and its characters. Particularly, how do we manage the “gaping rift between signifier and signified” (142) to understand Bechdel as a character and person, not only within her memories of the past, but in the present day of her narration? This question comes back to the central tension of fictional character that we have focused on over the course of our class.