"Big Me" by Dan Chaon

Hi everyone.

Dan Chaon is great a creating captivating characters. I found the character from “Big Me” to be very interesting because he comes off as pretty weird and different. I like the fact that he is really imaginative, seeing the town he lives in, Beck, as a big city with mysteries to solve. It’s even more interesting because everyone he encounters in his “city” has some sort of a role that he has given them. Like his parents being the landlord and wife that live downstairs from his modest one room flat.

It makes a lot of sense that he would become quiet imaginative seeing as how he lives in a very small town but at the same time Andy/Andrew’s imagination seems to get a little out of hand. You might find yourself asking if he can distinguish real life from his imaginative world, because he takes his imaginative world/ persona to a different level when he brakes into peoples houses and steals “clues” and tortures cats to get confessions. I wonder if he actually has some kind of mental disorder, which seems probable, especially when starts having blackouts, or if he is just a really strange kid who’s active imagination just takes over sometimes in order to help him have fun.

At first I thought maybe this is just some sort of childhood phase but the story goes on to describe him 20 years later when he’s married and has children. He mentions how he keeps his blackouts a secret and how he can’t tell his wife about how he sometimes follows strangers around to see what they are up to, because he still plays detective even as an adult. I really like Andrew as a character he makes you wonder how stable he is. He seems like he could be a real person. What does everybody else think about him?