I Am The Cheese

The cheese stands alone, 

The cheese stands alone,

Heigh-ho, the merry-o,

The cheese stands alone

            In Robert Cormier’s I Am The Cheese, teen protagonist Adam Farmer attempts to bike across state lines in order to give a present to his father, all while a doctor attempts to understand more about Adam’s troubling childhood.  The story mixes three different forms of documentation to tell its story: transcripts of interviews recorded on tape, third person omnipotent narration, and first person present tense narration.  Each one of these forms of documentation helps to illuminate a different aspect of documentation and how it affects how a story is told and interpreted, while also helping the novel portray its themes of personal identity, loneliness, and the relative nature of truth.   

The first form of documentation, the transcripts, help give the novel a framework that pushes the plot along while also providing commentary on the passionless nature of absolute truth.  The tape transcripts that appear sporadically throughout the novel (documenting conversations between “T” and “A”) are impersonal, only stating what is spoken and by whom, as well as marking the lengths of silence in between answers and responses.  As we learn by the end of the novel, Brint the interviewer is not a doctor, but an agent working for the Witness Reestablishment Project who is investigating the deaths of Adam’s parents and the possible guilt of a fellow agent known as Mr. Grey.  To Brint, Adam is nothing more than a means to an end, the only living witness who can prove whether Mr. Grey did in fact betray Adam’s family to the mob.  He cares little for Adam’s overall well-being, so long as he can extract the information that he needs.  The ending of the novel proves as much when the final transcript reveals the exact purpose of Brint’s interrogation, as well as his recommendation to terminate Adam, due to his failure to provide any new information for three years in a row.  While this form of documentation is technically the most truthful, since it describes with a hundred percent certainty what is said and what occurs, it lacks the heart and interesting detail of the other types of narration.  It’s also, ironically, the most dishonest, since Brint withholds his true identity as a government worker from Adam, as well as his true motivations behind the interrogation.  In his paranoia, Adam calls Brint out for this on several occasions, claiming that Brint is fishing for information or that he already knows everything that Adam is telling him.  This claim is validated by the end of the novel.  In summary, although the tape transcripts are technically the most accurate and objective means of describing what happens in the story, their clinical, cold nature conceals truth and does not, in fact, document the whole story in a fulfilling way.

In contrast to this, the more traditional third person narration helps to fill in the narrative gaps that the transcript leaves, and helps to portray Adam’s desires, inner thoughts, and eventual loneliness and despair. We learn more about Adam through this more conventional narrative documentation.  We learn of his love for Amy Hertz.  We learn of his desire to become a writer.  Most importantly, we learn that Adam Farmer is, in fact, Paul Demonte, and that due to his father’s position as a witness against organized crime, the family was relocated and renamed when Adam was very small.  It is in this element that the story’s theme of loneliness, loss of personal identity, and truth become the clearest.  Once Adam learns of his old life, he feels as if Paul Demonte is dead, which represents his feelings of his old life dying and being reborn in a new identity.  Adam begins to sympathize with his parents, especially his Mother, and he grows to understand their strange behavior and their fear of the unknown, or as Adam’s mother describes it, the “Never-knows.” Ironically, when Adam learns the truth of his past, it does not set him free, but causes him to becomes more guarded and sheltered.  In Adam’s case, ignorance truly was bliss, and learning the truth has created a new set of problems for him.  He can never reveal his true past to anyone, not even his girlfriend Amy, lest he bring his family to danger.  His only connection to his past life is his parents, and this leaves Adam feeling isolated from his friends and neighbors.  Once his parents are killed, his only connection to reality is shattered, leaving him truly alone in the world.  By utilizing a more traditional third person omnipotent perspective to tell this part of the story, Cormier effectively portrays Adam’s transition into loneliness, as well as the crippling and isolating effects of truth.

The most interesting of the three forms of documentation is the first-person present tense perspective.  During this narration, Adam describes his delusional bike trip from Monument, Massachusetts to Rutterburg, Vermont, where he encounters bullies, mean dogs, and helpful strangers.  In the final chapter of the novel, we learn the truth of this first-person perspective: that everything Adam described was a delusion inside his head as he rides his bike around the Mental Institution in Rutterburg.  Even though this narrative is the most objectively false, since none of the events described by Adam occur in the real world exactly as he says, there is a lot of truth that can be gleamed from it.  To Adam, it is the truth.  It has become his reality, his way of giving his life purpose and meaning after the deaths of his parents left him alone in the world.  His delusion becomes the only way that he has to cope with all of his anxieties, fears, and childhood traumas. He does encounter all of the people in the story, even if their true identities are those of other mental patients or doctors or nurses.  Through this, we learn a lot about who Adam is as a person, how he confronts problems and stressful situations, and how his past experiences have negatively affected him.  By experimenting with three different forms of documentation, some more objective and others more truthful, Cormier presents an intriguing narrative featuring an unstable, unreliable narrator and expounds on the nature of personal identity, loneliness, and the nature of truth.