Believe: American Gods By Neil Gaiman [Critical Analysis]

Neil Gaiman’s American Gods applies the hero archetype within it's protagonist. Established in an ordinary world, then transported on a voyage around America, American Gods is a novel about a journey of self-discovery. 

Gaiman’s novel is a contemporary retelling of a variety of mythic beliefs. The religious battle between the old gods/deities and the newer, technologically advanced gods throws the protagonist into other worldly places and dreams. American Gods adopts elements of Joseph Campbell’s monomyth plot structure in his text ‘The Hero with a Thousand Faces’ – this essay focuses on one element, the departure. 

Campbell’s paradigm reflects the novels path on its mythological adventure with its ordinary everyman, Shadow Moon. Gaiman also depicts the voyage and return structure from Christopher Booker’s ‘Seven Basic Plots’. Similar to the initiation substage from monomyth, the frustration stage is the overwhelming effect of the mythical world conjuring many oppressive behaviours for the protagonists. Booker’s idea of the return carries the same principles as Campbell’s ‘nuclear unit of the monomyth’ (p.28), the return, inferring the idea that the hero’s journey follows a standard path, faced with rights of passage within each stage. 

Campbell’s departure unit of the monomyth is where Gaiman depicts Shadow as leaving the ordinary world to begin his journey into the unknown. The hero’s outlook on the world is made clear within the exposition, ‘the only good thing – about being in prison was a feeling of relief. The feeling that he’d plunged as low as he could plunge, and he’d hit bottom’ (p.3). Prison offers familiarity for Shadow and this grim, stoic attitude towards his situation, outlines the ordinary world in which Shadow is accustomed to. There are substages within the departure element, the first noticeable one in the novel is the call to adventure. Campbell states that this adventure starts with ‘an atmosphere of irresistible fascination about the figure that appears suddenly as guide’ (p.46). Upon meeting Mr. Wednesday, Shadow is allured by his wise, omniscient persona – Wednesday seemingly knows all about Shadow, offering him a job. Then there is a refusal of the call according to Campbell, in this case Shadow’s refusal of working for Mr. Wednesday despite many attempts of persuasion. 

At Jack’s Crocodile Bar – the crocodile being symbolic to the predatory agenda of Wednesday – the protagonist, having lost his wife, friend and job, offers a coin toss to decide whether or not he works for Wednesday, who calls heads. Shadow rigs the toss to work in his favour, however, Wednesday (aka Odin) magically charms the coin. Shadow would rather believe he made a mistake with the coin trick than admit anything supernatural occurred. Here, Gaiman illustrates the hero’s ignorance towards the mythical world he is journeying further into. Shadow’s refusal to the epic responsibilities he finds later in the novel is a significant part of the hero archetype. Although the character of Wednesday has always been a villain, he works as a supernatural aid for the protagonist, at least in the first act of the novel.

Campbell conveys that the ‘protective figure’ provides certain benefits before a hero’s many conquests such as amulets, weapons – in the novel, Wednesday provides three glasses of mead to Shadow before his fight with Mad Sweeney, the Leprechaun. Three being a formidable number in Norse mythology, binds an unbreakable contract between the two characters and the mythical adventure or voyage looks onward to the first threshold. This reflects the anticipation stage from Booker as it’s the fall into the other world. An unknown mythical world, although familiar to the American landscape, where the protagonist interacts with bone orchards, crows that speak, blazing buffalos and deities that pluck silver coins from the moon. Gaiman’s fantasy genre supports the voyage as not only a journey of self-discovery for the hero but manifests an important role of belief: of magic, myths, the unknown, gods and monsters. There’s a vicarious approach to the belief of Gaiman’s mythos, as Shadow becomes familiar with the supernatural world, leaving the prior equilibrium behind, audiences also leave behind the exposition’s normalcy for the rest of the novel. 

The major threshold in Gaiman’s novel is reached after travelling far from Chicago and stopping at a roadside attraction ‘The House on the Rock’, a place that resonates power and magic. The old gods join Mr. Wednesday and Shadow on the famous carousel, where they all start to turn into their true forms as the overwhelming spin confuses Shadow. At the start of chapter six, Shadow’s world view changes drastically, ‘the images that reached his mind made no sense: it was like seeing the world through the multifaceted jewelled eyes of a dragonfly […] He was looking at Mr. Nancy, an old black man […] simultaneously he was looking at an extraordinarily tall man with teak-coloured skin and three sets of arms’ (p.144). Gaiman presents this supernatural performance as the first moment in which Shadow believes in the mythical world, he is now a part of. Gaiman applies the figure of the threshold guardian to Mr. Wednesday, when this old, magical figure grants the entrance into the famous Norse Old Hall after the carousel ends for the protagonist. Shadow requires a threshold guardian in order to pass the initiation stage of the monomyth since Mr. Wednesday will need to be bypassed and the father figure atoned with. 

The final substage of the monomyth is the Belly of the Whale, the hero’s descent into darkness despite the threat of death. Here, American Gods moves away from the archetype of successful ‘conquering or conciliating the power of the threshold’ and instead, ‘is swallowed into the unknown, and [appears] to have died’ (p.83). For the protagonist, the descent is gradual and complex. In fact, the old gods themselves and Gaiman’s coming to America chapters, indicate the end of the departure considerably. Having passed the first threshold after leaving their homelands: Odin left Norway, Mr. Nancy left West Africa, Easter left Germanic folklore, Bilquis left Egypt and Czernobog left Slavic mythology in Russia, they have already departed accompanied with their believers (immigrants). 

Upon arrival, they enter the Belly of the Whale and are ‘swallowed into the unknown’ on foreign land. Once powerful gods find themselves weak when separated from their surplus of worshippers. Campbell defines the last departure point ‘instead of passing outward, beyond the confines of the visible world, the hero goes inward, to be born again’. The gods, now in America are born again and reinvented to fit into the new world – omitting traditions for sleeker, contemporary methods of worship. The character of Wednesday explains ‘We have, let us face it and admit it, little influence. We prey on them, and we take from them, and we get by; we strip and we whore and we drink too much; we pump gas and we steal and we cheat and we exist in the cracks at the edges of society. Old gods, here in this new land without gods’. The old gods are on a journey of reclamation for what they’ve lost, symbolic of the monomyth journey during the return. 

Campbell claims the return ends ‘having died to his personal ego, he arose again established in the Self. The hero is the champion of things becoming, not of things become, because he is […] nor is he fearful of the next moment […] Thus the next moment is permitted to come to pass’, Gaiman depicts the old gods as risen after death. However, it will never be their former selves prior to coming to America due to the drastic contemporary changes with religion, science and technology. 

Bibliography 

Gaiman, Neil, American Gods (Review, 2001)

Gaiman, Neil, Norse Mythology (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017)

American Gods, dir. Bryan Fuller (Starz, 2017)

Campbell, Joseph, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2004)

Booker, Christopher, The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories (Continuum, 2005)

Delahay, Matti, ‘Imaginary Things: Modern Myth in Neil Gaiman's American Gods’ (University of Jyväskylä, 2001), pp. 39–52. 

Egner, Jeremy, ‘‘American Gods’: Why a Story About Ancient Deities Is Relevant Now’, The New York Times (2017), <https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/26/arts/television/american-gods-neil-gaiman-starz.html> [accessed 25 March 2020]