Example Of Essay On Reality Vs. Mythological Storytelling

In Big Fish (both the novel and the book), we have two kinds of storytelling; the one when the son - William Bloom - is speaking and the one when his father -Edward Bloom - is speaking. William is more down to earth. He looks at the world with a logical scientific point of view. When he was a child, he used to enjoy his father’s stories, but as the stories became more repetitive and he grew older, he could not stand them anymore. Therefore, whenever in the novel, William is narrating, the story seems like a realist fiction.
But with Edward, it is all different. He has had a magical childhood, and though most of the things he says has happened (the witch, the monster) probably is not true, the way he tells the stories - his magical realism - is convincing enough for the reader to imagine all that easily and even believe it to some extent.
William is the one who tries to see the world realistically, and Edward is the one who thinks the world is too boring to see it that way. And that is why in Edward’s world there are witches, monsters, giants, glass eyes and hidden towns, and William thinks they are just imaginative brainchildren of his father’s mind.
In mythological-storytelling, the tone of the narrator is so important in conveying the message. The best way to narrate a magical story is to tell as if it has really happened and there is nothing strange about it. That is the way most of the great novels in magical realism genre have been written (e.g. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez) and that is the way the Big Fish story has been told, both in the novel and the movie.