I Am the Cheese

“I don’t want to be confined to a bus. I want the open road before me, I want to sail on the wind.”

The bike symbolizes independence, and Cormier uses imagery and juxtaposition to show the bike’s freedom. The reader sees Adam sitting on a bus next to an image of him biking on “the open road.” The two alternative realities prefigure the wider alternate realities of Adam’s real and imagined life.

“They were speaking in whispers but their voice scratched at the night and the dark.”

The contentious “whispers” of Adam’s parents foreshadow their secrets. The diction—words like “scratched”—reflects the novel’s journalistic vocabulary and emphasizes the discomfort of the Farmers’ position.

“It’s a terrible world out there. Murders and assassinations. Nobody’s safe on the street.”

The older man alludes to suspicious political events, like the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. Like a journalist, the older man’s diction is blunt, and his words prefigure the murders of Adam’s parents. When Adam’s journey is revealed to be imaginary, the narrative suggests that the fears spoken by the man are Adam’s own fears.