Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work.

Reconciling a Strained Relationship

The relationship between Will and Edward Bloom, son and father, is at the heart of Big Fish, and Will has spent his entire life trying to figure it out. Throughout most of the novel, Edward and Will are estranged because Will believes that his father’s life is built on falsehoods, jokes, and fantasies. Will yearns to know the truth, but Edward knows no other language than fantasy and tall tales. The strained tension between them creates a separation that lasts for decades. When Edward is diagnosed with cancer, Will returns home in hopes of reconciling and repairing their bond. During this time with his father, described in the four “takes” on Edward’s death, Will begins to understand Edward and appreciate his father’s unique gifts. Will learns that reconciliation is built on acceptance. When he accepts his father’s eccentricities and stories, the strain lessens. His father sees the world differently than most people. When Will accepts this, he realizes that he’s not as different from his father as he thought.

Storytelling as a Way of Making Meaning

On his deathbed, Edward remarks that a person’s stories are what makes him or her immortal. If this idea is true, then Edward may very well live forever. At least he will live as long as people read his story, the novel Big Fish. For Edward, stories are life. For Will, his father travels for business on long trips. However, for Edward, when he travels, he visits a town called Specter that he buys and frequents, living with a young woman he loves and knowing everyone by name. Specter may not be real, but it is real for Edward, and as such, it becomes real for Will. Edward’s stories are more real to him than life itself and sharing them with Will creates meaning. When Will claims in the prologue that “My father became a myth,” he means that his father became his stories. Now that Edward is gone, the stories are all that Will, Sandra, Dr. Bennett, and everyone else who knew Edward have. Edward hands his son meaning by giving him stories that can be passed down through generations. The stories create a personal mythology that exists outside of time, space, and the orderly rules of reality.

The Boundaries Between Reality and Fantasy

From the very first page, Wallace, through Edward, blurs the boundaries between fantasy and reality and creates a novel of magical realism. The world of Big Fish is grounded in reality, but exaggerated and even fantastic elements, characters, and events are normalized and abundant. They appear in every story and every chapter. After a prologue grounded in reality, the first chapter leaps into fantasy when one man in Ashland goes crazy, eats rocks, and dies. It takes ten men to carry him to his grave. On the day Edward is born, his father wrings the sweat from his bandana into a cup for something to drink later. During a snowstorm, young Edward builds a sixteen-foot snowman and the family sleeps in the treetops. These fantastic details exist alongside real ones, from a giant named Karl to a magic glass eye to Mrs. Rainwater’s magic girdle. These fantastical details are all normalized by Edward’s voice and immortalized by Will’s (and Wallace’s) repetition. For Edward and Wallace, fantasy is reality and reality is fantasy.