I Am the Cheese Themes

Imagine being told that you were born with a different name, that you had family members you had never met, that your entire life was being orchestrated by a total stranger. That's exactly what hap...

If there's one thing we learn from I Am the Cheese, it's that memory is a precious thing. We take for granted the fact that we can recall why we entered a room (usually…) or whether our parents a...

What is real for Adam? It's impossible to say. Often in literature we see characters whose versions of reality differ from those of the people around them. In I Am the Cheese, Adam experiences diff...

Feeling alone and being alone are two different things, and in I Am the Cheese, we observe both. Adam feels alone because of deceit – being lied to and having to lie creates a sense of distance b...

There are two different types of deceit in I Am the Cheese. First we have explicit deceit, obvious to both the characters and the readers: Adam's parents lied to him about their past. More captivat...

The dynamics of the Farmer family are really interesting. On the one hand, you've got parents who lied to their son for most of his life and a son who took to spying on his parents. On the other ha...

Adam is afraid of everything, it seems. Open spaces, closed spaces. Dogs, teenage boys. Being alone, being followed. But the important question isn't what does someone fear but why do they fear it?...

Adam suffers in many different ways throughout I Am the Cheese. Although he undergoes physical pain, in the form of headaches, nausea, and even a major head injury, it's the emotional suffering tha...