What Big Fish By Daniel Wallace Actually Is
Big Fish By Daniel Wallace is a 1998 novel about a son trying to figure out who his father really was after he dies. The father, Edward Bloom, spent his life telling outrageous stories — he was a giant, a circus strongman, he married an enormous woman, he got swallowed by a whale, he knew Aldous Huxley. The son, Will, is a pragmatic insurance salesman who finds all of these stories unbelievable and feels they kept his father at arm's length. The book follows Will trying to separate the man from the myth. I read this book because a professor assigned it, and I went in expecting something lighter than it actually is. It turned out to be a fairly serious examination of how narrative works in families and how we construct the people we love. Not that you'd know that from the premise, which sounds like something out of a fantasy novel.The Structure and How It Works
Wallace uses a frame narrative. The bulk of the book is Edward's story, told through his own legendary retellings, and Will's perspective books are woven in as commentary and emotional counterpoint. This is where people get tripped up if they're reading it casually. It doesn't follow a traditional linear plot. Instead, it operates on emotional logic — the idea that a person's life is not a sequence of facts but a collection of meaning-making stories. One thing beginners miss about this structure: the father's tales are not meant to be decoded as literal autobiography. A lot of readers spend the entire book trying to figure out what actually happened versus what was embellished. That's not really the point. The embellishments are the point. Edward Bloom's lies and exaggerations are how he made sense of his own life, and how he made his life make sense to everyone around him. When Will finally comes to accept the stories, he's not accepting facts. He's accepting that his father's way of living — through myth-making — was valid.I ran into a problem when I first tried to use this book in a book club setting. Half the people were treating it as a mystery to solve, asking questions like "was there really a giant?" and "did he actually work for a carnival?" The other half were purely emotional and didn't want to engage with the mechanics at all. We ended up going nowhere for the first hour. The workaround was to just skip the fact-checking debate entirely and ask everyone to pick one story from the book and explain why they thought it mattered emotionally, regardless of whether it "happened." That kept us moving.
