Big Fish Edward Bloom Sparknotes

The man, the myth, the legend- a Big Fish Essay

Who is Edward Bloom? In Big Fish by Daniel Wallace, Edward Bloom creates a persona of himself as a way to evade the truth about his life by telling stories to his son, William. But as Edward is dying, William wants to learn the truth about who his father really is, but he finds that Edward is unwilling to share it, which dampens the trust and understanding in their father-son relationship. By the end of the book, Will learns the truth about his father: Edward disguises himself beneath his stories as a way to evade reality, to make himself a hero in the eyes of his son, and because he is ashamed and vulnerable from his failures. In spite of this, Will learns to accept the co-existence between his father's stories and his reality.

First, Edward tells altered stories about his life to evade the reality of his true self. He masquerades as a hero, but in reality, the hard truth is that he was not there for his son. In this first instance, Will is trying to extract some truth from Edward's childhood, and just as he thinks he is about to learn something about his father, Edward ends the story as another one of his jokes. This frustrates …show more content…
By saying this, he is indicating that he never told his son facts about his life because in reality, his life was not as extraordinary as it seemed in his stories. He wants to make himself seem to be heroic so that his son could never think of him as a failure in his absence. Edward's lies are easier to tell, and because of this, his son never actually knew his father's legitimate history, which thus deteriorated their relationship as William cannot understand his father. Next, Will is recounting his father's extraordinary figure in his childhood. Despite Edward almost never being present, William still believed that his father was his