This paper examines how Daniel Wallace's novel Big Fish uses myth and tall tales as mechanisms for both emotional distance and authentic intimacy. The analysis traces Will Bloom's evolving understanding of his father Edward across multiple retellings of Edward's death, arguing that the novel's competing narratives reveal a more nuanced progression than Tim Burton's 2004 film adaptation achieves. Drawing on comparisons to Homeric epic tradition, the paper explores how Edward constructs an identity through storytelling, how Will gradually accepts myth as a legitimate form of truth, and how the act of inheriting and retelling stories ultimately transforms death into continuation rather than conclusion.
The use of myth in Daniel Wallace's Big Fish is particularly what allows Edward Bloom to keep other people in his life at a distance. By stretching the events of his life into tall tales, Edward is able to create an identity for himself that is more noteworthy and memorable than the objective facts that typified his existence. However, Edward's son Will is called home to reconcile with his father as he nears death; one of Will's true motivations is to separate myth from reality once and for all. Essentially, this is the emotional setting of the story: Will believes that if he can divine the facts of his father's life from the myths, he will somehow be closer to him and understand him before his death. Yet, as he uncovers more of the inspirations for Edward's tall tales, he comes to realize that the fictional stories he has been told his whole life are more true to the character of his father than a straightforward telling of them ever could have been. Consequently, Will learns that in order to tell the story of his father's death, he must call upon the very myths that gave it meaning.
The novel Big Fish is rather more convincing than the film adaptation with respect to the representation of Edward Bloom's death. This is because the competing accounts of how the death came about reveal a more intricate progression of Will's understanding of his father.
At first, Will only sees the stories his father tells as ways to keep intimacy at bay. When Edward tells his son about how a local panhandler claimed that he owed him money, Will responds, "That's funny," to which Edward states, "Well, laughter is the best medicine," even though neither of them were laughing (Wallace 18). This exchange occurs within Will's first attempt at relaying the events of his father's death; it is significant that at this point he cannot even embrace the humor that exists within Edward's stories. Fundamentally, this is because Will is holding onto the hope that the underlying truth about how his father lived should come out at his end. So when he recognizes that his father's story is funny but cannot laugh at it, this is a consequence of his disappointment that Edward seems to refuse to abandon his own fictional tales.
Nevertheless, even within this first version of his father's death, Edward supplies one of the driving themes that will continue throughout the story: "Remembering a man's stories makes him immortal" (Wallace 20). Initially, Will disagrees, and Edward is not even sure that the statement is true. From Will's point of view, his father's explanations for why he failed as a father are mere exaggerations designed to make it seem as though there was no element of choice in his frequent absences. Edward tells his son that the earth splitting and natural disasters prevented him from being the father he should have been; yet he also admits that one of the things he most centrally wanted was to be a "great man" (Wallace 21). This comes as no surprise to Will, but it does partially explain the root of the tall tales. Overall, the first account of Edward's death is steeped in Will's version of objective reality. The humor of Edward's stories has vanished, the greatness of his life has been wiped away, and all that remains is a scaly old man slowly losing his faculties.
In the second interpretation of his father's death, Edward's point about jokes becomes more forceful. Will still doubts that any of his father's stories or jokes amount to anything meaningful; he wishes he had known the foundations of his father's belief system. However, Edward — like most people — possesses doubts about the infinite. Accordingly, he states, "Still, if I shared my doubts with you, about God and love and life and death, that's all you'd have: a bunch of doubts. But now see, you've got all these great jokes" (Wallace 73). The fact that Edward's dying word in this version is the punch-line to his joke suggests that Will's insistence upon deep intimacy is partially giving way to the realization that his father's myths and jokes were, in fact, a form of intimacy in themselves.
"Every story accumulates into a remembered identity"
"Edward parallels Odysseus battling fate and geography"
"The witch's eye foreshadows Edward's peculiar death"
"Film misses Will's obligation to carry on the myths"
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