Big Fish and Invisible Men

This might be the strangest comparison ever, but while reading Invisible Man, especially the first chapter, I was strongly reminded of Tim Burton's Big Fish, (which I later found out was actually based on a book). If you haven't seen Big Fish, then you might be confused by my oversimplified summary of it, but you should definitely add it to your list of movies to watch. These two stories are too different to have much in common at all, but what really struck me as similar between the two was the skewed sense of reality that both protagonists held. The first chapter of Invisible Man started of realistically enough, in fact, though the grandfather's parting words were confusing, and even appalling, it never stuck out to me as unbelievable. As I got deeper into the chapter, namely the 'battle royale' bit, I had a hard time absorbing the information that was being thrown at me, and almost couldn't believe that any of it was real. I had to reread it a bunch of times to actually take in what I was looking at, and I was still left with mixed feelings because I couldn't quite believe half the things that took place. As I contemplated the veracity of the narrator, I remembered how I had the same feelings while watching Big Fish. Big Fish starts off with some background information about the strained relationship between a father and his son. They reluctantly reconcile when the elderly father falls ill. We then find out that the main conflict between the two was because the father, Edward Bloom, constantly told fantastically, tall tales about his life that he adamantly argued were true. I won't go into details, but some of his stories involved wild giants living in caves and conjoined singing twins. Throughout the movie I was on the same page as the son, I didn't believe any of the old man's stories, but seeing him continue to enthusiastically tell his tales, while literally laying on his deathbed definitely generated some sympathy. At the end, Edward dies, and while attending his father's funeral, the son comes across some of Edward's estranged friends. Among them, he recognizes a 7'6 tall man as the so called giant, and a pair of normal, twin women as the conjoined twins. The son then realizes that while his father's stories weren't entirely true, they were exaggerated versions of real life events. In the same way, I think, especially since we're reading about the narrator from a point earlier in his life, many of the stories we come across might actually be exaggerated variants of real incidents. Why they are exaggerated, and even if they are exaggerated is still a mystery that I hope we'll be able to solve as the story goes on.