The Southern Tale-Telling Tradition in Daniel Wallace's Big Fish

Abstract

The art of tale telling is a staple of Southern culture, and making the everyday seem fantastic, is one of the hallmarks of Southern literature. In his novel Big Fish, Daniel Wallace uses tall tales and folk tradition to illustrate the Southern preoccupations with family relationships, rampant individualism, and other notes to weave a novel that is both contemporary and steeped in past tradition. While emphasizing the primacy of storytelling in the South and the influence of African culture, Big Fish manages to combine the spontaneous elements of oral tradition with the stable form of written text.