Big Fish

A Novel of Mythical Proportions

By Daniel Wallace

“Remembering a man’s stories makes him immortal”

“Remembering a man’s stories makes him immortal, did you know that?”

(Wallace 2003, 20)

“if a man could be said to be loved by his son, then I think that man could be considered great.”

“I think,” I say after a while, waiting for the right words to come, “that if a man could be said to be loved by his son, then I think that man could be considered great.”

For this is the only power I have, to bestow upon my father the mantle of greatness, a thing he sought in the wider world, but one that, in a surprise turn of events, was here at home all along.

(Wallace 2003, 22)

“Carry me,” he said, or so it sounded, his voice so was now I was doing my share of interpreting as I listened. He said, Carry me and You don’t know how I appreciate what you’re doing and When you see your mother, tell her – tell her I said good-bye. And so I carried him out of the car and down the mossy bank to the river and stood there before it, holding my father in my arms. And I knew what I was supposed to do then but I couldn’t do it. I just stood there, holding his body shrouded in a blanket on the banks of this river, until he told me, You might want to look away now and then Please, and all of a sudden my arms were full of the most fantastic life, frenetic, impossible to hold on to even if I’d wanted to, and I wanted to. But then all I was holding was the blanket, because my father had jumped into the river. And that’s when I discovered that my father hadn’t been dying after all. He was just changing, transforming himself into something new and different to carry his life forward in.

All this time, my father was becoming a fish.