60 pages • 2 hours read
Neil GaimanAmerican Gods
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2001A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Immigrant Experience in the United States
American Gods depicts a version of the immigrant experience in the United States of America as felt by the gods of people who come to the country. The country portrayed in the novel is a melting pot in which various cultures and people from different backgrounds are thrown into close contact with one another. Very few characters are simply “American”; instead, they are defined by their heritage and their culture. In the various Coming to America interludes, for example, Mr. Ibis traces the ways immigrants (and their gods) create the culture of the modern America that is depicted in the novel. These interludes show diverse scenes; enslaved Africans being taken to North America and the Caribbean; a Cornish woman sold into indentured servitude and transported to colonial America as punishment for stealing; the Scandinavian sailors who came to North America hundreds of years before the United States were founded. In each of these instances, people are taken, sent, or travel to America, and they bring their gods with them. Their immigrant experiences are shaped by the ways their cultures and gods interact with the existing society they encounter. Through these immigrants, the gods experience new lands and new worlds. The gods—like the people—are far from home and ripped away from the social institutions and expectations. They are compelled to radically reinvent their understanding of society and themselves based on their experiences as immigrants in a new land.
The America depicted in the novel is hostile to gods. As Shadow is told on numerous occasions, America is not a place for gods, as something about the landscape and the geography of the continent seems to reject them. In a cultural sense, the melting pot nature of the country depicted in American Gods forces changes to take place. Gods (like the people who bring them to the country) are taken from relatively monocultural origins and thrust into a new place where they are in the minority. In America, very few people worship the Norse pantheon. The Scandinavians who first bring Odin to North America leave him behind when they realize that America is hostile to their gods, as well as themselves. With this, Odin lacks the cultural hegemony that once made him so powerful. Instead, he awakens in a world where he is expected to contend with thousands of gods from thousands of cultures, all competing for the same raw belief. The immigrant experience of the gods competing for belief in a crowded market is similar to an immigrant experiencing the competitive, merciless capitalist society in the United States. This parallel is depicted most explicitly in Salim’s story, as Salim works tirelessly but can’t seem to get ahead.
The immigrant experience of the gods contrasts with the depiction of Indigenous beliefs. After living on the land for thousands of years, the Indigenous Americans have learned that the land is ill-suited to gods. Instead, they have legends and cultural heroes like Whiskey Jack. The contrast between the Indigenous bond with the land that rejects gods and the modern American immigrant experiences that bring old gods to a new land illustrates the relative youth of the United States as a country. In contrast to Indigenous Americans, everything about the modern United States is an immigrant experience. Everything is new and unfamiliar, to the point where gods and their believers have yet to adjust to the “new world” that they inhabit.
The Powerlessness of Gods
American Gods is a novel about powerless gods. Though they might have been considered strong, divine beings in their original cultural contexts, the gods in America are shadows of their previous incarnations. In the traditional sense, gods are worshipped by humans as creators, maintainers, and arbiters of morality. In the novel, gods are dependent on humans for the few remaining scraps of worship that they can muster. The old gods, in particular, struggle to cope with the modern era, and they pine for a time before, when they were given the praise, the worship, and the belief to which they feel entitled. The inherent irony of the gods of American Gods is their complete dependence on humans. They need human belief as they feed on it. They are sustained by it, and they can only accomplish their divine feats when they are empowered by the humans’ belief. In the United States, however, this belief is hard to come by. The old gods in their current, American incarnations are powerless to stop the inevitable. They cannot stop the decline in belief, nor can they leave the country. With so little power, most of them are just waiting to fade into irrelevance. In some cases—such as Thor’s—they take their own lives rather than delay the inevitable. They are powerless to prevent their loss of power.
The powerless gods are forced into a symbiotic relationship with humans. Once upon a time, they might have enjoyed a feeling of superiority and control over the people who worshipped them. Now, they are so desperate for anything resembling belief that they cater to the humans’ whims. The power dynamic of the gods and their believers has completely inversed. The Zorya sisters are forced to tell fortunes, Czernobog is made to take a job in an abattoir, and Odin becomes a conman. Their new roles are pathetic echoes of their former power, employing similar sets of skills in a greatly reduced role. Humans’ indifference and ignorance are a blessing and a curse for the gods. They are rendered powerless by their indifference, but that same ignorance of the gods’ existence makes humans easy targets for the simplest of tricks, which then summon a tiny fraction of belief and sustain the gods. This is far from a mutually beneficial arrangement, but the gods are forced to subsist on the gruel of indifference while they still can.
That the gods have known power in their previous incarnations makes them bitter. They resent the humans for their lack of belief; Odin justifies his crimes and his scams by blaming humans for not believing in him. The old gods also resent the new gods for taking their place and consuming the limited amount of belief on offer. The arrogant attitudes of the new gods reveal that they are not learning from their now-powerless forebears. They are unaware that their own downfall is just as inevitable. While a few select gods like Easter and Jesus are able to endure, almost every god is eventually reduced to a powerless state. Even new gods such as the god of railways experience downfalls in a relatively short span of time. Technical Boy seems to be the only new god who accepts their trajectory, and he frames this inevitability as a result of market forces. Gods are competing in the marketplace of belief, and they are beholden to the indifferent humans and their limited resources. The gods are as beholden to this market as the humans are to their own markets in modern America. The irony of the gods’ dependence on humans is that humans have created a capitalist economy that renders them equally powerless and unable to affect change. The gods may be powerless, but that does not make humans powerful.
The Promise of Resurrection
As in numerous world religions, resurrection emerges as an important theme in American Gods. The entire plot is premised on Wednesday trying to rekindle a dead existence. For him and the other old gods, religion is a dead end. They are struggling to get by on the limited belief that they can garner from the modern world. This is not a satisfying form of existence for the gods, and many have already disappeared. In this sense, Wednesday’s stated plot is framed in terms of a resurrection: He is offering the old gods the chance to fight for their own resurrection, to stare their own destruction in the face and seize control of their fates. In reality, the only beneficiaries of Wednesday’s plan are himself and Loki. He does not want to resurrect all the old gods; he wants to sacrifice them to renew his own lease on life. Wednesday understands the spiritual power of resurrection. He uses this power to tempt the old gods while tricking them into empowering him. Resurrection is the bait that he dangles before them to make his plan work.
Laura is the first character to be explicitly resurrected in the novel. With Shadow’s unwitting help, she wakes up after her death and is turned into a revenant figure. She watches over Shadow and, when necessary, intervenes in his life to help. When she was alive, Laura was not able to maintain her promise to Shadow. He was in prison, and she betrayed him by having an affair with his best friend. In death, Laura attempts to atone for her mistakes. By saving Shadow and watching over him, she wants to repay a debt that she knows she cannot repay. She cannot undo the past, but she can at least give her former husband a chance at a better future by intervening in his present. This pursuit of atonement comes at a cost, however. Laura is resurrected, but she is not as she once was. Her body remains dead, even if her spirit does not. Her body slowly rots over the course of the novel, to the point where she coughs up worms and maggots while talking to people. As her body rots away, she lives just long enough to save Shadow and intervene in Wednesday’s plan. Though she has asked Shadow for a way to make her alive again, she eventually seeks something else. She gives him back his coin, and he takes it, allowing her to die. Laura’s experience of resurrection allows her to atone, not through her actions but through accepting the inevitable. Her past, like her death, is not something that she can change. She learns to accept reality, and she accepts her fate.
Shadow’s resurrection takes place in the latter third of the novel. After being hanged from the world tree, Shadow dies. His death is a strange, “mystical” experience but not a permanent state. After wandering through an abstracted, dreamlike afterlife, Shadow is brought back to life by Easter. In this moment, his story mimics one of the few successful gods portrayed in American Gods. In the Christian Bible, Jesus Christ is resurrected after being dead for three days. His resurrection is traditionally celebrated on Easter, which, the novel suggests, is a reinvention of a traditional pagan holiday. The Christian Jesus and the pagan Easter are forged together to create a new system of belief. Shadow dies and is resurrected by Easter; because of this, he is able to avert Wednesday’s plan and bring about a new world for the gods. After his death, Wednesday’s death, and Shadow’s resurrection, the old gods are ushered into a new era. Like the Christian death and resurrection, Shadow’s resurrection is the signifier of a paradigm shift: A new spring has arrived to replace the winter.
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By Neil Gaiman
