I Am the Cheese Literary Elements

Coming of Age, Mystery, Orphan Quest

Recent past (flashbacks of protagonist’s childhood) in Monument, road and towns traversed through on the way from Monument to Rutterburg (present, but really a mental fabrication), present day mental hospital (including undated transcripts of tape interviews). All of this is in the 1970’s.

Adam Farmer is the narrator in the bike ride plot. The flashbacks are in third person with understanding of Adam’s inner thinking. The transcripts are third person limited, they are only dialogue, and no narration is present.

Suspenseful, tragic, unsettling.

Adam is the protagonist. There is an interrelated trifecta of antagonists, made up of Brint, Mr. Grey, and the crime syndicate Anthony testified against.

Adam remembering his past as he journeys to where he thinks is father is.

Adam’s parents die/he remembers that they have died as he arrives at Rutterburg/finishes his bike ride lap around the yard of the mental hospital.

The guy who works at the gas station stresses to Adam that he fears identity theft. Mr. Grey is referred to Mr. Thompson and Brint’s tag in the transcriptions is “T”. Everyone that Adam meets on the bike ride is related to the hospital, foreshadowing the true circumstances of his “bike ride”. The fake death that Mr. Grey arranges for the Delmontes is the same way that the Farmers later die.

Arnold says that Edna is “not herself” this is especially true because she actually is one of the patients in the mental hospital along with Adam.

Adam’s name has religious undertones and the Farmer in the Dell song alludes to the situation that the Farmer family is in. These allusions hint at the two most significant themes of the novel, the corruption that comes along with powerful organizations and identity.

The imagery used to describe Adam’s bike ride parallels the imagery use to describe the hospital. Everyone he encounters along the ride or in the hospital is described in tangible, black-and-white terms, contrasting with Mr. Grey who is never physically described in detail and whose intentions and affiliations are also never fully revealed. Imagery and concreteness in this novel are equivalent to the truth.

The Farmers believe that by trusting Grey to keep the safe and hiding from Anthony’s enemies, they are keeping themselves safe. In truth, Grey is connected to mysterious and dangerous people and it is their faith in him which results in their downfall. By stifling their true identities, they become more and more like Grey who has no real discernable identity- to the extent that Adam even forgets who he is.

There is parallelism in the plot of the song "Farmer in the Dell" and the circumstances of Adam Farmer's family. There is also parallelism between the characters Adam meets on his bike ride and the characters in the mental hospital.

Mr. Thompson/ Agent 2222/ Brint/ Interviewer T could all be one man standing in for a larger organization, or they could be many different men of that organization. Either way, these four men (or one man) represent a whole crime syndicate.

"The rain dances on the ground, the way water jumps and leaps if you drop it on a hot stove," (Cormier 38). Adam, like the water in the rain, is seemingly a spring shower that dances in a beautiful way through the circumstances of his life, but actually, there is a sinister undertone here: Adam is literally jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire when his family try to escape.