American Gods Literary Elements

Fantasy

The action takes place all over U.S.A. over the course of a few months. The narration also goes back in time for a few chapters to explain some key moments in America's history.

The events are related from a third person objective narrator.

Tragic, comic, sad, regretful, violent

The protagonist is Shadow and the antagonists are both the Old Gods and the new ones.

The major conflict is between the past and the present, namely between the Old Gods who are unable to adapt to a new society and the modern world, always changing and always in a rush.

The story reaches its climax when Shadow learns who his father is.

Before being realized, Shadow spends some time and talks with an African-American man named Sam Fetisher. Sam tells Shadow that a storm is coming and he must be careful because things will not be as easy as he would hope. Sam Fetisher’s statement foreshadows the troubles Shadow will have to go through after he gets out of prison.

When a guard tells Shadow that he has some good news for him proves to be an understatement because Shadow finds that his wife Laura died in a car accident.

It is alluded that Mr. Wednesday is actually the old Norse God Odin and there are certain elements that prove that this statement is true. When Shadow meets Mr. Wednesday for the first time, he notices that Mr. Wednesday has a strange tie pin that looks like a tree. The tree from the pin could be considered as being the tree Yggdrasil from Norse mythology. Also, Mr. Wednesday knows details about Shadow that a normal person could never know such as the conditions in which Laura died. These could be allusions made towards Odin’s capability to know everything.

In the third chapter, Mad Sweeny sees Shadow playing with the coins left to him by Low Key and performing a coin trick. Then, Mad Sweeny does his own coin trick, producing out of nowhere a gold coin and then making coins fall out of nowhere into his cup. The image invoked here through this scene is that of a real leprechaun who has an unlimited supply of money. It also implies that Mad Sweeny is a supernatural being.

The Gods are presented in a paradoxical manner in the novel. While one may be inclined to believe that Gods are almighty and powerful, they are in fact dependent on whether someone believes in them or not. If no one believes in them, then the Gods die. In this sense, the Gods are more fragile than one would think and depend on their subjects’ devotion.

A parallel can be drawn between Shadow and Czernobog during their game of checkers. Czernobog uses the same strategy every time he plays, pointing towards the fact that he is unable to adapt and change to fit better in a new society. Shadow however is willing to learn from his past mistakes and adapt to the present. The parallel has a much larger application and it applies to two large groups of people, namely the old gods and the new civilization.

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He stared at Shadow, the buffalo man, and he drew himself up huge, and his eyes filled with fire. He opened his spit-flecked buffalo mouth and it was red inside with the flames that burned inside him, under the earth.