The novel opens with protagonist Adam Farmer biking from his home in the fictional town of Monument, Massachusetts to visit his father in Rutterburg, Vermont. The story alternates with transcripts of tapes between a "subject" and Brint. The subject receives psychotherapy and is interrogated by Brint. As the book continues, it is revealed that Adam is the subject, who was formerly Paul Delmonte of a small New York town. His father, "David Farmer", was a newspaper reporter who was enrolled in the Witness Protection Program. The family moved to Monument and escaped several close calls with their identities, but the parents are killed in the penultimate chapter in a car collision. Adam/Paul survives, and is taken to a government mental asylum. The last chapter implies that WPP agents killed the family and reveals that Paul is regularly interrogated on the topic. Each time, Paul is unable to handle his realizations of his past and embarks on his delusional bike ride across the ground of the facility. At the end of the last tape, Brint recommends authorization to murder Adam.
Characters
Adam Farmer – teenage protagonist
David Farmer - Adam's father, a former newspaper man. He pretends to work for an insurance company.
The elderly couple - the man helps him out of the ditch, while the woman criticizes him
Aunt Martha the only relative they're allowed to talk to
Title
This quote is the last verse from "The Farmer In The Dell", a song that Adam sings during the book:
The cheese stands alone
The cheese stands alone
Heigh-ho, the merry-o
The cheese stands alone
He sings many of these songs throughout the novel. The song contains several characters, each taking someone with them when the farmer leaves, yet the cheese has nobody. Adam believes that he is the cheese. He is alone in the world, his mother dead and his father missing, and he lives in a hospital. Another point is that his father had taught him the song, possibly as a way to reinforce the new name, 'Farmer,' they had adopted.
Literary significance and criticism
The 1975 novel I Am the Cheese began Cormier's experimentation with first-person, present-tense narration. When Cormier sent the manuscript to the publisher of his previous novel, The Chocolate War, he was confused and depressed, convinced that he was alienating his new young adult audience because of the complex and ambiguous story. However, I Am the Cheese proved to be a success.
Awards and nominations
I Am the Cheese was named to five annual book lists according to the publisher description of the 20th anniversary edition. It won the 1997 Phoenix Award from the Children's Literature Association as the best English-language children's book that did not win a major award when it was originally published twenty years earlier. It is named for the mythical bird phoenix, which is reborn from its ashes, to suggest the book's rise from obscurity.
