I Am the Cheese is a suspenseful mystery novel published by the American novelist and journalist Robert Cormier in 1977. A longtime resident of the Northeast, Cormier centers his story on a teen boy, Adam Farmer, who believes he is biking from his Massachusetts hometown to a hospital in Vermont to visit his dad—a journalist who risked his life to testify against massive wrongdoing in government. In fact, Adam has been committed to a psychiatric hospital. The story centers on the themes of Persistence on Journeys, Constant Threats and Fears, and Constructing and Manipulating Identity. It became a film in 1983, and, along with The Chocolate War (1974), it remains one of Cormier’s most esteemed novels.

This guide refers to the 1977 Pantheon Books edition. Citations given are for page numbers in this edition.

This guide numbers the novel’s chapters to enable reference although these are unnumbered by Cormier.

Content Warning: I Am the Cheese makes reference to violence, threat and murder, and to potential psychological abuse and incarceration. The novel focuses on childhood psychological trauma as a result of threat, family bereavement, and identity crisis.

Plot Summary

The story is generally told through the first-person present-tense voice of the protagonist Adam, with interpolations from the transcript of interviews between a “subject” (revealed to be Adam) and a doctor.

Adam Farmer tells his story. He lives in Monument, Massachusetts, and he’s riding his no-frills bike to Rutterburg, Vermont, to see his dad, who’s in the hospital. He doesn’t say goodbye to anyone—not even to his romantic interest and friend, Amy Hertz—and he doesn’t take his medicine with him.

At a gas station, Adam meets an older man with bulging veins in his face. The man warns Adam about the world’s manifold dangers. To keep his spirits up, Adam sings “The Farmer in the Dell,” a nursery rhyme from the 1820s. Adam’s dad, Dave, claims the song is about their family as they have the name Farmer.

A taped discussion takes place between Adam and a government official named Brint. Adam wonders if Brint is a doctor and if he’s in a “private sanatorium.” Brint is evasive and pushes Adam to remember his past, and Adam recalls leaving home when he was around three years old. It felt more like “running away” than moving, and his mom looked deeply sad. Brint encourages Adam to talk about Paul Delmonte and Amy, but Adam resists. He remembers walking to the library with his dad to check out a record by the jazz musician Louis Armstrong. Something made Dave Farmer suddenly change direction and head into the woods, where they encountered a monstrous dog that bit Dave.

On his bike trip, Adam encounters an aggressive dog in front of an abandoned house. He rides his bike at the dog, and a car comes along and distracts the dog. Rain soaks Adam, but he persists, singing “The Farmer in the Dell” to stay optimistic.

In another town, three teen boys harass Adam and push him into a ditch. A couple in a station wagon arrives, and the man, much to the woman’s chagrin, helps Adam and gives him a ride to his next stop.

In the tape transcript, Adam remembers Amy. She was beautiful, funny, and not ashamed to let out “farts” in his presence. For amusement, she performed “Numbers,” pranks like filling a grocery cart and abandoning it in the store or writing fake love letters to a hated teacher.

Adam believed he was born in Rawlings, Pennsylvania. When someone from Rawlings visits Amy’s dad, they say they’ve never heard of Adam’s family. Adam discovered he had two birth certificates with different birth dates. He also listened in on his mom’s phone calls: His parents had told him they had no living relatives, but the woman on the phone referred to Adam as her “nephew.”

In the transcripts, Adam considers someone he knew as “the gray man” or Mr. Grey. Grey regularly visited the Farmer house,  reviewing “confidential reports” with Dave Farmer in his soundproof basement office. Adam believed that Dave was an insurance agent, and Grey was his supervisor but, after Adam eavesdropped on a contentious conversation between his parents, Adam realized that this isn’t the truth.

Adam’s dad isn’t Dave Farmer but Anthony Delmonte, a small-town journalist who revealed key evidence and testified in a secret Senate committee, leading to the downfall of many powerful people. Dave and his family became targets, with people trying to blow up his car and shoot him. To protect his family, Dave joined the Re-Identification Department, a form of witness protection. Grey was in charge of Adam’s case: He gave Adam’s family new identities and moved them from Blount, New York, to Monument, Massachusetts. Adam’s mom hated the new identities and location, and both parents were suspicious of Grey and his motives.

On the bike trip, Adam leaves his bike to go to a drugstore. When he comes out, the bike is gone. A big-bodied person identifies the thief, who Adam confronts and gets his bike back. Adam stops at the Rest-A-While Motel, where he and his parents once had a cozy time. The motel isn’t open anymore, and, after numerous phone calls to Amy, Adam realizes that neither Amy nor her family exist—he has made them up. It becomes clear that Adam has also created the bike journey from Massachusetts to Vermont. His bike ride was only around the psychiatric hospital grounds where he is confined. The people he met along the way were people from the hospital.

In the transcripts, Adam remembers Grey advising the Farmers to leave town for a bit as they might be in trouble. This Northeastern road trip began pleasantly, but soon they noticed a car following them. Dave assumed the people in the car belonged to Grey and were protecting them. Feeling safe, Adam’s family left the car to enjoy the scenery. The car that was following them crashed into Adam’s parents, killing his mom and dad. Unnamed people (possibly Grey and his team) apprehended Adam and took him to the psychiatric hospital. Brint advises Adam to sing “The Farmer in the Dell” to self-comfort. Adam sings and says that he now knows he’s the cheese in the song.

In his final report, Brint concludes Grey didn’t conspire to kill Adam’s parents. Brint thinks the department should reinstate Grey and “terminate” Adam or wait for him to “obliterate.”

The final passage repeats the opening verbatim, as Adam’s journey begins again as a loop.