american gods essay

American Gods

By neil gaiman.

Protagonist Shadow joins a mysterious old Mr. Wednesday on a quest across America to recruit old gods, fading in relevance, for an epic war against new ones.

In a nutshell...

Recently released ex-con Shadow Moon encounters the enigmatic Mr. Wednesday on a plane. Wednesday, representing old gods in America, offers Shadow a position as his bodyguard. As they crisscross America, a war simmers between the old gods, established but fading in prominence, and a new generation of gods fueled by technology. Shadow is caught between these warring factions and strives to see beyond a shifting screen of deceit to the truth behind the conflict.

Key Moments

• The Old God's Feast: Mr. Wednesday makes a feast for the old gods, inviting them to fight on his side against the new gods
• Shadow's Vigil: Shadow is crucified, as a wake for Mr. Wednesday, who is killed by the new gods.
• The War of the Gods: the old gods and new gods are locked in an epic battle, which is really Mr. Wednesday's ruse to offer their lives as a sacrifice

Main Characters

• Shadow Moon:   protagonist, ex-con, hired as bodyguard by Mr. Wednesday to protect him in upcoming war between gods.
• Mr. Wednesday: antagonist, alter ego of Odin, Norse God of war. He orchestrates a war between the old and new gods.
• Mr. Nancy: an ally of Mr. Wednesday, incarnate of the Ghanaian trickster god, Anansi.

America is a fitting setting for the story of "American Gods", as the old gods are losing relevance in a country where immigrants forget their old identities and are subsumed into a new culture. Due to this amnesia, the old gods transported from their old lands become weakened.

Continue down for the complete summary to American Gods

Article written by Ebuka Igbokwe

Bachelor's degree from Nnamdi Azikiwe University.

‘ American Gods ’ by Neil Gaiman imagines what it might be to have gods incarnate , living among and interacting with us. It tells about a war fought across America between gods of old and new-age gods in a contest for power and influence.

Neil Gaiman’s ‘ American Gods ’ is divided into four parts: Shadow , Mike Ainsel , The Moment Before the Storm , and Epilogue and Postscript .

Part 1: Shadow

The story introduces Shadow at the end of a three-year prison term, receiving news that his wife Laura died in a car crash.

He meets an old man who seems to know a lot about him and who offers him a job as a bodyguard. Shadow also realizes that his former boss, who he hoped to give him his old job back, died in the same accident that took his wife. He reluctantly accepts the job offer.

The old man is Wednesday, and they meet with Wednesday’s colleague Mad Sweeney, a drunk and rowdy Irish , at a pub where they drink to seal the deal, and Mad Sweeney does a magic trick that materializes a gold coin from the thin air. Wednesday himself, an amateur magician, wants to know the trick. Mad Sweeney wants to fight him, and when he loses, he gives Shadow the gold coin.

We see here Gaiman’s talent for creating colorful characters. Once Mad Sweeny is introduced, his crazy, larger-than-life personality eclipses everyone nearby. His presence becomes an event in itself, and the mere introduction of a side character enlivens the action.

At Laura’s wake, his former boss’s wife Audrey reveals to him that Laura and Robbie were having an affair. At the funeral, Shadow drops the gold coin he received from Mad Sweeney into Laura’s grave. Laura appears to him in the night at his motel room and they talk. She thanks him for the gift of the coin. Shadow is unsure if this is a dream or a real thing.

Shadow is only vaguely aware of Wednesday’s planned venture, and he follows him, in what forms the novel’s rising action, as he meets with several characters like Mr. Nancy, Czernobog, and the Zorya sisters to persuade them to join him on the mysterious venture. Czernobog proposes a wager: he will join Wednesday if he loses a checkers game against Shadow. He will strike Shadow on the forehead with a sledgehammer if he wins. Shadow loses one game and wins a rematch.

In the night, one of the Zorya sisters, Polunochnaya, plucks a silver dollar from the moon and gives it to Shadow, saying it is for protection.

While Mad Sweeny’s production of a gold coin was obvious and looked like a convincing coin trick to Shadow, Zorya Polunochnaya’s silver dollar from the moon had the feel of true enchantment for him. I notice a contrast in Shadow’s treatment of the fantastic events that happen in the day and those that happen at night. Shadow took the events at night at face value because they could be interpreted as dream events. However, he often doubted the day’s magic and tried to explain them away as tricks or normal events.

Wednesday recruits Shadow for a bank heist , where he takes advantage of a snowstorm and an out-of-service ATM to steal cash deposits. The proceeds are to help fund a feast Wednesday has planned. The heist is a success. Wednesday, Mr Nancy and Shadow visit House on the Rock and ride on a carousel that miraculously transports them into another world. The carousel animals are transformed into fantasy animals, and Nancy, Wednesday, and the rest of the characters who attend this meeting called by Wednesday are revealed to be quite different from their normal appearance. Shadow finds out in due time that they are the incarnate of old gods in America.

Wednesday reveals his mission. He wants to recruit the old gods to fight with the new gods, who he claims are threatening their existence. Very few of the old gods who attend are convinced.

The story’s primary conflict is sparked when Shadow is picked up by a contingent of the new gods. They had taken him earlier and tried to intimidate him to stop working for Wednesday. This time, they kidnap him and torture him to reveal information about Wednesday. On the night of his capture, a resurrected Laura comes to his rescue. She kills the guards who keep Shadow captive, freeing him. As he escapes, a raven, which Shadow figures out is a messenger from Wednesday, tells him to go to Cairo.

Shadow’s escape marks a turning point in the story , as he is now on the run from the new gods. Shadow buys a used car and makes his way to Cairo, Illinois, to meet Wednesday’s friends, with whom he will stay for a while. Along the way, he picks up Samantha, a hitchhiker , and drops her off.

Gaiman uses a narrative device in which he intersperses the action with anthropological or pseudo-historical accounts of gods in America, giving the story much-needed context. He also uses it to avoid info-dumping in the middle of the action. This gives the reader a sense of the precarious position wherein the old gods in America find themselves, and makes the plot weighty and credible.

Wednesday’s friends are undertakers Mr. Jaquel and Mr. Ibis and their cat. Mad Sweeney finds him there and asks Shadow to return the gold coin, which he reveals as a kind of good luck charm. Finding that Shadow has lost the coin, Mad Sweeney drinks himself to death, and his corpse is cared for by the undertakers. In a dream, Wednesday is visited by the undertaker’s cat, which shapeshifts into a woman, and she heals the injuries he sustained in the torture he received in captivity.

Part 2: Mike Ainsel

Shadow is installed with a new identity in Lakeside, Wisconsin, as Mike Ainsel, Wednesday’s nephew, accompanying his uncle on business trips. Here, he meets an old local, Mr. Hinzelmann, the local cop, Chad Mulligan, and his new neighbor, Marguerite Olsen. They also introduce him to a local tradition where a clunker (the hull of an old car) is driven out into the middle of the lake frozen over in the winter. Citizens of the town buy lottery tickets to predict the time and date at which the hull will break through the ice.

Shadow dreams about a figure, Buffalo Man, who informs Shadow that he must sacrifice himself to bring his wife Laura back to life. Shadow also dreams about thunderbirds but has no idea what that signifies. Wednesday calls him, angry at him: his dreams were alerting notice, which Wednesday sent him to Lakeside to avoid.

Wednesday arrives in Lakeside and takes Shadow across America to recruit more gods for the upcoming war. They are almost ambushed by the new gods and have to detour through another realm, which Wednesday called ‘the backstage.’ There, they meet Whiskey Jack and John Chapman, old legendary figures too, and they refuse Wednesday’s invite but are attracted to Shadow, advising him to abandon Wednesday.

The cast of characters in this novel (the old gods, in particular) is plentiful and comes from diverse sources. However, past a point, the plentitude of characters becomes a detriment. Very few of these characters add anything significant to the story and are soon forgotten after they show up.

When Shadow returns, several things happen in Lakeside. A child is missing, one Shadow remembers seeing when he first came into town. An undead Laura also visits him and claims he was calling her. He is invited by Marguerite to dinner, and he meets Samantha, who happens to be Marguerite’s sister. She is suspicious of him but believes he is not a bad person and allows him to keep his secret. He encounters Audrey, who is visiting Chad by some coincidence, and she reveals to Chad that Shadow is a criminal.

Chad detains Shadow at the police station, and Shadow calls the undertakers in Cairo. While waiting, the station’s television, under the control of the new gods, broadcasts Wednesday’s assassination. Mr. Nancy and Czernobog, disguised as police officers, come to rescue Shadow. They confirm to Shadow that Wednesday has been killed.

Part 3: The Moment of the Storm.

Shadow, Mr. Nancy, and Czernobog meet with Mr. Town, Technical Boy, and Media from the camp of the new gods to retrieve Wednesday. Shadow recognizes the driver of the new gods as Low Key Lyesmith, a former inmate with whom he was close. He also recognizes Low Key as Loki and guesses that Loki is a double agent.

While the plot twist of Low Key being Loki is ingenious, I find it a bit unimaginative. Granted, Loki is a trickster who is known for lying and bending the truth, but I expect that a master of cunning should come up with a better disguise.

Shadow insists on keeping a vigil for Wednesday as he had promised Wednesday, a decision opposed by Mr. Nancy and Czernobog, who think the vigil is dangerous and would kill him. They come to a field with a bare silver tree and the three old women there strip Shadow and strap him on the tree. Mr. Nancy and Czernobog leave Wednesday’s corpse at the foot of the tree to which Shadow is tied.

Shadow is expected to last nine days, but by the third day, he passes out from the strain. Before passing out, he is visited by a squirrel, Laura, and Horus. He advises Laura to ask the old woman for a drink from Urd’s well, to come back to life. Horus is naked and introduces himself as Ibis and Jacquel’s former companion who wandered off.

When Shadow passes out, he sees some revelations in a trance-like state. He discovers he is Wednesday’s son. And he figures out that Wednesday and Loki were running a scam on all the gods. He undergoes some life-or-death trials in the underworld, which he passes but chooses not to return to life.

While Shadow is hanging, the story’s climax, the war between the old and new gods, starts. Mr. Town breaks off a branch of the silver tree on which Shadow is hanging, but he does not touch Shadow. He had been warned by Mr. World not to harm Shadow. As he is returning the stick he meets Laura. Laura is recovering a bit after drinking from Urd’s well. She hitch-hikes with Mr. Town but kills him and takes the stick to Mr. World herself.

At the end of the novel, several events happen that are hard to keep track of, and each of them detracts from the story’s climactic finish. There are so many things happening that none delivers a satisfying punch.

Horus, for his part, rushes off to the battleground to bring Easter, the one who could restore Shadow to life. She rides on a thunderbird to Shadow, and when he is resurrected, Shadow is not excited to be back.

Laura brings the stick to Mr. World, who is Loki, but instead of giving it to him, she kills him by impaling herself and Loki together with the stick. Loki mocks her effort, saying that as long as the battle happens, his and Wednesday’s plan will succeed.

However, in the story’s climax, Shadow rides into the battle and reveals to the fighting gods that Loki (Mr. World), the god of chaos, and Odin (Wednesday), the god of warfare, want both parties to kill themselves to refill their god powers by this sacrifice. The fighting gods desist from the battle, and thus Wednesday’s plan is foiled.

Part 4: Epilogue and Postscript

In the novel’s falling action, Mr. Nancy and Shadow return to Mr. Nancy’s home in Florida, and Shadow remembers something revealed to him in his trance during his vigil. He returns to Lakeside.

This development that comes almost as an afterthought makes a case against Gaiman drawing out many side plots for “ American Gods “. Long after the main story is done, he is forced to return to the story of a murder mystery that might have been important at the time it was revealed, but which didn’t seem to matter anymore, after the the main plot has been resolved. The story would have been stronger if it were more simple and straightforward.

He goes to the clunker sitting on the frozen lake and finds the missing girl in the trunk. At that moment, the ice breaks, and Shadow falls into the water.

Mr. Hinzelmann saves Shadow. At that moment, Shadow also realizes that Hinzelmann is the culprit, but because he owes his survival to Hinzelmann, Shadow would not attack him. Hinzelmann is a kobold who sacrificed children to give Lakeside its prosperity over the years. As they discuss this revelation, Chad comes in and shoots and kills Hinzelmann. He is so guilt-stricken at the cold-blooded murder that he contemplates suicide. Shadow extracts the memory of the murder from Chad’s mind to protect his life.

The novel’s resolution reveals Shadow visiting Iceland . He meets Odin there and hands him Wednesday’s glass eye. The Odin in Iceland admits that Wednesday is his alter ego but is not connected to him.

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About Ebuka Igbokwe

Ebuka Igbokwe is the founder and former leader of a book club, the Liber Book Club, in 2016 and managed it for four years. Ebuka has also authored several children's books. He shares philosophical insights on his newsletter, Carefree Sketches and has published several short stories on a few literary blogs online.

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American Gods

60 pages • 2 hours read

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Before You Read

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-4

Chapters 5-8

Chapters 9-12

Chapters 13-16

Chapter 17-Postscript

Character Analysis

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Discussion Questions

In what ways does Wednesday reflect American culture? How much can his interpretation of culture be trusted?

Shadow performs coin tricks. How do the coin tricks help him, and what do coins represent in the novel?

Czernobog represents duality in the novel. Is he scared that he may be replaced by his brother when spring arrives?

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The Role of Intertextuality in Neil Gaiman’s American Gods

The American cultural identity and the essence of modern America are concepts difficult to describe and define. Neil Gaiman, a highly acclaimed British writer, tried to capture, in his award-winning novel, American Gods, the “real” America, and its elusive cultural identity. This article aims to uncover the intertextual references in American Gods, since Gaiman’s work is renowned for its extensive intertextuality. It also attempts to analyse the role and the importance of references in the creation of the American identity, and its cultural representation in Gaiman’s novel, by examining the types, functions, and effects of intertextuality.

Related Papers

This paper aims to address the mythopoeic aspect of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, so as to disclose the elements of American cultural identity embedded in the novel. It is an attempt to analyse its legends, myths, folklore, popular culture figures, intertwined with Old World mythology, assessing their viability as modern myths, through the lens of formalist and structuralist reading.

Romanian Journal of English Studies

Leonie Viljoen

This examination of “American gods” argues that mythology is the bedrock for creative and poetic expression in literature that explores and comments on the universality of contemporary human concerns in a world where the spiritual link with the gods has largely been severed and belief systems have mostly lost their meaning. The discussion investigates and identifies the significance of shamanic properties and practices as elements which aid the protagonist Shadow Moon in his journey of self-discovery, and illustrates that the novel’s mythification represents an attempt to “reach below the surface of modern superficialities and reconnect with something old and mysterious within the depths of our soul” (Freke, 1999:6). Gaiman’s unique style in conveying tales that have fashioned the past, the manner in which he evokes the meeting-place of science, fantasy, myth, and magic, and the synthesis he fashions between the ancient and the modern illustrate that the imaginative life is sustaine...

Journal of Language and Literature

eka nurcahyani

Markéta Effenbergerová

The aim of this thesis is the analysis of mythological figures that appear in American Gods written by Neil Gaiman, specifically those that have major influence on the protagonist or those that make bigger appearance throughout the novel. The first part of the thesis presents biography and the work of the author and it tries to look closely on his journey as a writer. The second part presents the origin story of the novel and its summary. The final part of this chapter deals with the question of human belief in higher power. The third and fourth chapters compare the mythological characters with literature of their origin and how they influence the story. It also points out parts of their personality that differ from the originals.

Siobhan Carroll

This essay analyzes the representation of place and its relationship to personal and national identity in Neil Gaiman's American Gods. Since Tolkien, fantasy literature has often represented what human geographers call "place" as threatened by capitalist modernity, a formulation that recalls Edward Relph's and Marc Augé's arguments concerning the growth of placelessness and non-places in late-capitalist society. Urban fantasies such as Megan Lindholm's Wizard of the Pigeons (1985), Charles de Lint's Moonheart (1984), and de Lint's Newford stories developed this image of embattled place in the 1980s and 1990s. In contrast, the plot of American Gods argues that the threat to place, and with it, the threat to national and local identities, has been overstated. The novel concludes by suggesting not only that national identity is a fictive construction but also that neither a sense of place nor stable identity is truly necessary to human existence.

Gillian Polack

The nature and structure and inhabitants of the USA's god-universe, created by Neil Gaiman for his novel American Gods, is useful for understanding how the assumptions made during the building of a world for a novel affects gender perception. This paper will explore the implications of this.

Robert Tally

Seth Pierce

Neil Gaiman has won nearly every literary award available and is arguably the most famous of postmodern novelists. This study performs a cultural artifact analysis of his novels in order to explore the worldview embedded in his narratives.

Iñigo Urionaguena

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American Gods Essay Topics & Writing Assignments

Essay Topic 1

The premise of Neil Gaiman's novel is founded on the notion that the gods whose belief systems came to America with immigrant peoples have lived in some human form in America of centuries. As such, Gaiman is tasked with the duty of creating a human character that represents something essential about each god. Write an essay on the personification of the intangible, focusing on three belief systems:

Part 1) Czernobog and his three daughters are a Russian family living in Chicago. What belief system do these four characters represent? What duties do they perform, and how are these duties manifest in a modern America? As modern characters, how have the traditional duties of these gods adapted to a new era?

Part 2) Mr. Nancy is clearly intended to represent the African god Anansi. Describe Mr. Nancy, both his physical appearance and the occupation he has in modern America...

(read more Essay Topics)

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Paris Olympics closing ceremony means America is next. And IOC, I have questions.

Los angeles is up next as host of the 2028 summer games. how will la beat the paris olympics' opening ceremony.

As with the Olympic opening ceremony , my three-generation family will be watching Sunday's closing ceremony . Like millions of our fellow earthlings, we've been glued to our screens on all platforms for so much of the Summer Games in the past two weeks that I wouldn't dream of missing the finale.

My family will remember the Paris Olympics for so many viral moments, including:

• The already most-decorated-gymnast Simone Biles , 27, winning four more medals for Team USA.
• How swimmer Katie Ledecky , 27, became the most decorated American female Olympian of all time with 14 medals.
• Jerome Brouillet's photo of Brazilian surfer Gabriel Medina , 30, and his board levitating above the ocean as he earned a near-perfect 10.
• French pole vaulter Anthony Ammirati , 21, gaining followers because, as he posted on TikTok after his crotch knocked down the crossbar, "You create more buzz for your package than your performances."
• Zeng Zhiying, a 58-year-old table tennis player who missed out on being selected to represent China in Los Angeles in 1984 but in Paris represented Chile. Her Olympic debut at our age was heavenly.  

A much more down-to-earth feat, though, will be what sticks with me after the 2024 Summer Games. It's also what brought a few questions to mind.

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When can we see Ant play Ping-Pong with Lily? It's heartwarming that Edwards showed up to cheer Zhang on as she advanced to the round of 16. And bravo that his team invited her squad to basketball practice , where they traded souvenirs and autographs. But the U.S. Major League Table Tennis could use the help of NBA gods to gain support. Take pity on us mere mortals and hold an exhibition.

Where's Russian figure skater Kamila Valieva? In February 2022, during the Beijing Winter Games, I wrote a column saying, " I have never wanted a 15-year-old to fail so much in my life . But when (Valieva) executed her short program ... that's exactly what her team's handling of her positive drug test had reduced me to – a spiteful fan who loved her during the pre-Olympics competitions but now feels betrayed. ... Russia grabbed gold, the USA earned silver and Japan won bronze."

Olympics diversity: Would you call Olympic gold medalists Simone Biles or Suni Lee a 'DEI hire'?

As USA TODAY Sports columnist Christine Brennan wrote this past week: " The Russian scandal ... forced the original medal ceremony to be canceled and triggered an infuriating series of international delays and appeals, finally ending with a Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) ruling less than two weeks ago." On Wednesday, the 2022 U.S. Olympic figure skating team ‒ including "Rocketman" Nathan Chen ‒ finally got their gold medals and the Japanese skaters got their silver, all surrounded by their loved ones at the foot of the Eiffel Tower.

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Josh Rivera and I reasoned: "For decades, men and women shooters competed against each other in international events. At the 1976 Olympics in Montreal, American  Margaret Thompson Murdock tied for first with teammate Lanny Bassham in the small-bore rifle competition. After the judges examined the targets, they awarded the gold medal to the man and the silver to the woman. To Bassham’s credit, he asked Murdock to share the top podium with him as the national anthem played.

"After that, the International Olympic Committee phased out mixed-gender shooting and created events just for women. Yet in the 21st century, shooting remains one of the  few collegiate sports that’s gender blind ‒ and in which women are highly competitive. It’s time to take a fresh look at which sports lend themselves to head-to-head competition, regardless of gender."

Opinion alerts: Get columns from your favorite columnists + expert analysis on top issues, delivered straight to your device through the USA TODAY app. Don't have the app? Download it for free from your app store .

Equestrian remains the only Olympic sport that's gender neutral . So our editorial question from eight years ago still stands: "If the horse doesn’t care who’s handling it, why should a gun?"

How will Los Angeles beat the Paris Olympics' opening ceremony? I can't wait to see how Sunday's closing ceremony will compare with the opening ceremony's historic parade of nations on boats down the River Seine. But L.A. holds the next Summer Games. How do you top the Eiffel Tower? Traditionally, at a closing ceremony, the next Olympic host also puts on a show to tease coming attractions. There are rumors that Tom Cruise, who's been prominently attending numerous Olympic events around Paris, will execute some wild stunt .

Hollywood, bring it.

Thuan Le Elston, a  USA TODAY Opinion  editor, is the author of " Rendezvous at the Altar: From Vietnam to Virginia ."

You can read diverse opinions from our USA TODAY columnists and other writers on the Opinion front page , on X, formerly Twitter, @usatodayopinion and in our Opinion newsletter .

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Who Are the Far-Right Groups Behind the U.K. Riots?

After a deadly stabbing at a children’s event in northwestern England, an array of online influencers, anti-Muslim extremists and fascist groups have stoked unrest, experts say.

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By Esther Bintliff and Eve Sampson

Esther Bintliff reported from London, and Eve Sampson from New York.

Violent unrest has erupted in several towns and cities in Britain in recent days, and further disorder broke out on Saturday as far-right agitators gathered in demonstrations around the country.

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American Gods Background

By neil gaiman.

These notes were contributed by members of the GradeSaver community. We are thankful for their contributions and encourage you to make your own.

Written by arushi Singh, Via Romano, Austin Colorite, Dessi Gravely, Kenroy Hunter and other people who wish to remain anonymous

American Gods is a novel written by acclaimed author Neil Gaiman in 2001. The story follows the protagonist, Shadow Moon , a man who is released from prison only to find himself in the midst of a war between the gods of old and the new gods of modern society.

Gaiman drew inspiration for the novel from various mythologies and cultures around the world, creating a rich tapestry of gods and supernatural beings that inhabit the world alongside humans. The novel explores themes of belief, faith, and the changing nature of American society.

One of the key aspects of American Gods is the concept of old gods versus new gods. The old gods, such as Odin, Anansi, and Czernobog, are traditional deities that have been brought to America by immigrants and worshipped by their descendants. These gods are facing obsolescence as modern society worships new gods like Media, Technology, and the Internet. The novel delves into the struggle for power and relevance between these two groups of gods and the impact it has on both the divine and mortal realms.

In addition to the gods themselves, American Gods also explores the role of belief and faith in shaping the world. The power of belief is shown to be a driving force behind the gods' existence, with their strength and influence directly tied to the number of followers they have. This concept raises questions about the nature of reality and the power of human belief to shape the world around them.

The novel also delves into the immigrant experience in America, as many of the old gods are brought to the country by immigrants seeking a better life. Gaiman uses these characters to explore themes of displacement, assimilation, and cultural identity in a country that is constantly changing and evolving.

Overall, American Gods is a compelling and thought-provoking novel that explores complex themes of belief, power, and identity. Gaiman's masterful storytelling and richly drawn characters make it a standout work of modern fantasy literature that continues to resonate with readers today.

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American Gods Questions and Answers

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Study Guide for American Gods

American Gods study guide contains a biography of Neil Gaiman, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

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The novel starts as a man named Shadow Moon is getting ready for his release from prison, after three years inside. Shadow has spent his time practicing coin tricks and reading a copy of Herodotus’s Histories borrowed from his cellmate Low Key Lyesmith . Two days before he is supposed to be allowed to go back to his beloved wife Laura , Shadow finds out that his wife has died in a car accident. He is released early and catches a plane back to his home in Eagle Point, Indiana so that he can attend the memorial. On the plane, Shadow falls asleep and has a strange dream about a man with a buffalo head who tells him to believe “everything.” When he wakes, he meets a strange man who calls himself Mr. Wednesday and offers Shadow a job. Shadow refuses, then gets off the plane early to avoid talking to Mr. Wednesday any more. Meanwhile, the narrator describes a goddess in Los Angeles named Bilquis practicing her particular brand of sexual magic, swallowing a client whole when he agrees to worship her with his body.

Shadow rents a car and starts to drive home, stopping at a bar for dinner. Mr. Wednesday is at the bar, and he offers Shadow the job again. This time, Shadow accepts, drinking three glasses of mead with Wednesday to make the deal official – promising to be Wednesday’s assistant and to hold Wednesday’s vigil if Wednesday ever dies. Mad Sweeney , a friend of Mr. Wednesday’s who calls himself a leprechaun, arrives at the bar and shows Shadow how to make a gold coin appear, seemingly out of thin air. Shadow thinks this is just a normal coin trick, and Mad Sweeney shows him how to do it too. Shadow gets so drunk from the mead that the next day he forgets what happened, and just wakes up with a gold coin in his pocket.

Before starting his job as Wednesday’s assistant, Shadow asks to go to Laura’s funeral. At the funeral service, Shadow finds out from Laura’s best friend Audrey Burton that Laura died while in the process of having an affair with Audrey’s husband. Shadow is hurt, but tries to forgive Laura. He throws the gold coin he found in his pocket into Laura’s grave, then goes to meet Wednesday at a hotel. On his way, Shadow is kidnapped by a “New God” named Technical Boy , who tells Shadow to give Wednesday the message that the Old Gods are obsolete.

Shadow finally makes it to the hotel, and tries to go to sleep despite disturbing dreams of forgotten gods. In the middle of the night, his wife Laura appears, now a walking corpse, and promises to protect Shadow now even though she betrayed him in life. The novel then switches to tell of the first Northmen who came to America and brought the Norse gods Odin, Tyr, and Thor with them, planting these gods of death and deception on American soil. Back with Shadow, Wednesday tells Shadow to drive him to Chicago, where Shadow meets the Zorya sisters and Czernobog . Wednesday tries to convince Czernobog to join his fight against the New Gods, but Czernobog doesn’t agree until Shadow wagers his life on a game of checkers. Shadow loses the first game, giving Czernobog the right to kill Shadow with a hammer, but wins the second, meaning that Czernobog has to help Wednesday first. That night, Zorya Polunochnaya , the moon sister, gives Shadow a silver Liberty coin and blesses him with protection.

Shadow and Wednesday spend the next day robbing a bank, showing Wednesday’s affinity for cons, deception, and tricks. Shadow himself is fairly adept at taking on a new identity for the sake of the grift. Wednesday then tells Shadow to drive them to the House on the Rock, a strange tourist attraction that Wednesday calls one of the most important places in America. Wednesday meets up again with Czernobog and another god called Mr. Nancy . They all ride a carousel that transports them to a huge Norse hall, where a few gods are assembled. Shadow finds out that Wednesday is really the Norse god Odin, and that all the gods came to America with the immigrants who believed in them. Mr. Nancy, with his talent for stories, and Mr. Wednesday, with his ability to make rousing speeches, try to convince the gathered gods to fight against the New Gods who have stolen their power, but the other gods are not interested in taking that risk.

Everyone goes back to the House on the Rock, and Shadow is captured by Mr. Wood and Mr. Stone , two hitmen for the New Gods. They take him to an abandoned train in the Wisconsin woods, where they beat him and interrogate him about Mr. Wednesday’s plans. Wednesday holds on to his Liberty coin and gives away nothing. Early the next morning, Laura appears and kills Mr. Stone and Mr. Wood so that Shadow can escape. Shadow walks south through the woods, following a raven who tells him to go to Cairo and find “Jackal.” Shadow reaches a gas station, where the attendant tells him Cairo is in Illinois and sells him a used car. Shadow drives down to Cairo, picking up a hitchhiker named Sam Black Crow along the way. Sam, a half-Cherokee girl, tells Shadow a story about Odin where a sacrifice that was supposed to be symbolic turns into a real death. Shadow gets Sam to her destination, then spends the night in a motel where the TV comes to life and offers him fame and fortune if he joins the New Gods.

Shadow keeps driving, finally reaching Cairo where he finds the Ibis and Jacquel Funeral Parlor. Mr. Ibis welcomes Shadow to live with them and help out with their work as funeral directors and autopsy prosecutors. Shadow feels at peace in Cairo, listening to Mr. Ibis’s stories of how different gods came to America and meeting Bast – a cat goddess who helps heal the many injuries Shadow has accumulated on his journey so far. After spending the beginning of December in Cairo, Shadow runs into Mad Sweeney, who begs Shadow to give the gold coin back. After hearing that Shadow gave the gold coin away, Mad Sweeney drinks himself to death. On Christmas Eve, Mr. Wednesday reappears and takes Shadow back north, giving him the identity “Mike Ainsel” and sending him to live in a small Wisconsin town called Lakeside. That night, Shadow has a dream that he is reborn out of the earth and meets the star people, after the Buffalo Man tells him to look for a thunderbird in order to bring Laura back to life.

On Christmas Day, Shadow makes it to Lakeside, where an old man named Hinzelmann helps show him around the town. Everyone he meets in Lakeside repeats what a good town it is. Shadow meets the local policeman, Chad Mulligan , and settles into his apartment for the freezing Wisconsin winter. He joins in the town tradition of buying a raffle ticket to guess when a car parked on the frozen lake will crack through the ice, marking the arrival of spring. Shadow tries to find out more about thunderbirds so he can help Laura, even dreaming about a thunderbird one night. Every once in a while, Wednesday comes to get Shadow so that Shadow can accompany him on visits to different gods, including the goddess Easter in San Francisco. Easter seems to hate Wednesday, but takes a liking to Shadow and reluctantly agrees to help Wednesday.

When Shadow returns from San Francisco, Chad gives him the bad news that one of the teenagers in the town, a young girl named Alison , has disappeared. Shadow learns that this is only the latest in odd disappearances that seem to happen every winter. Wednesday takes Shadow again to South Dakota where they have to sneak “Backstage” behind Mount Rushmore on foot to avoid a trap set by the New Gods. While Backstage, Shadow touches a bone that transports him into the body of a man named Mr. Town , who works for Mr. World , the leader of the New Gods. Shadow thinks that Mr. World’s voice sounds familiar, but can’t place it. Shadow and Wednesday emerge from Backstage at the house of Whiskey Jack (Wisakedjak), a Native American hero. Whiskey Jack refuses to join Wednesday’s lost cause and tells Shadow that the dead must stay dead even if he finds a thunderbird.

In February, Shadow makes more journeys with Wednesday, and takes long walks through the Wisconsin forest when he is in Lakeside. One walk takes him to a graveyard where Laura is waiting. Laura asks Shadow if he is really alive, and Shadow is hurt by the question. Meanwhile, the war between the gods starts to take lives, with Bilquis ending up as one of the first casualties. Wednesday calls Shadow to say that he is going to attend a peace talks meeting with the New Gods.

One day Shadow goes to dinner with his neighbor, who turns out to be Sam Black Crow’s sister. Sam is there visiting, and demands to know the truth about Shadow. Shadow tells her, after Sam assures him that she can believe impossible things, but their conversation is interrupted when Audrey Burton, ostensibly visiting her cousin Chad, shows up and demands that Shadow be arrested for skipping parole. Chad reluctantly takes Shadow down to the police station, where he finds out that Shadow is in fact an ex-convict. While in the Lakeside holding cell, Shadow sees a live feed of the Peace Talks between the Old and New Gods where Wednesday is murdered, shot through the head on camera. Mr. Nancy and Czernobog arrive to get Shadow out of jail, both shaken by Wednesday’s death.

The novel flashes back to the first people to arrive in America, following the orders of their mammoth god despite the misgivings of their shaman woman. The shaman woman sacrifices herself so that the tribe can reach America safely, but her distrust means that these first people will eventually be overthrown in America. The tribe soon forgets about their mammoth god as they create new gods on American land.

After Wednesday’s death, the Old Gods band together to avenge him, finally agreeing to fight the New Gods. Shadow insists on sitting Wednesday’s vigil (as he had promised to), which means being tied to a tree for nine days. The New Gods hand over Wednesday’s body in the center of America, a small park outside of Lebanon, Missouri, where no god has any power. There, Shadow finds out that his old cellmate Low Key is actually the Old God Loki, who has defected to the New Gods’ side. Mr. Nancy and Czernobog take Shadow and Wednesday’s body to an ash tree in Virginia, called the “world tree.” Three women ( The Norns ) tie Shadow to the tree to sit Odin’s vigil.

Shadow’s nine days are a wash of pain and hallucinations, including a vision of an elephant-headed god who tells Shadow, “it’s in the trunk.” Laura visits Shadow again and offers to cut Shadow down, but Shadow tells her to go get a drink of water from the fates to revive herself as her body continues to decay. Shadow dies while on the tree and finds himself in the underworld. There, Zorya Pulunochnaya takes back her Liberty coin and turns it into a moon to light Shadow’s way. He chooses to walk the path of hard truths, finding out that his father was actually Mr. Wednesday. He then goes through the Egyptian Hall of the Dead, where Bast, Mr. Ibis, and Mr. Jacquel weigh his heart and give him the choice of where he wants to go next. Shadow asks for nothing, just rest.

Meanwhile, the gods all gather at a tourist attraction called Rock City on Lookout Mountain in Tennessee. Laura goes to the farmhouse and gets water that restores her body to a freshly dead corpse, then meets Mr. Town, who has been sent to cut a stick for the ash tree where Shadow hangs. At the same time, Easter goes to the ash tree to revive Shadow. At Rock City, Mr. World kills Technical Boy, one of the New Gods, and dedicates the death to Odin, starting Mr. Wednesday’s revival.

Shadow stays in darkness for a while, then finds Whiskey Jack, who tells him that America is not a place for gods. The land is the most important thing in America, he says, and anything the gods do is only to serve themselves. Shadow realizes that Wednesday’s plan all along has been to use a war between the gods to give himself power, as Loki is going to dedicate all the deaths to Odin before the fighting starts. Back at Rock City, Laura has killed Mr. Town and stolen the ash stick . She finds Mr. World and sacrifices herself to use the ash stick to kill Mr. World before he can throw the stick as a spear and dedicate the war to Odin. Meanwhile Easter resurrects Shadow and Shadow rides a thunderbird back to Rock City. Shadow finds Mr. World and figures out that it is really Loki in disguise, part of the two-man con that Loki and Mr. Wednesday have been pulling. Shadow then goes Backstage at Rock City and tells all the gods the truth, about both Mr. Wednesday’s trickery and the tentative place of all gods dependent on human belief in America. The gods all leave, refusing to fight each other now. The Buffalo Man congratulates Shadow for taking his own godly power and using it for good to honor the land of America.

With the battle diffused, Shadow finds Laura and takes the gold coin back so that she can move on and die for good. Shadow leaves Rock City with Mr. Nancy, but soon figures out that he has to get back to Lakeside before the car falls through the ice. Shadow gets back to Lakeside on March 23rd, the exact day he bought for the raffle. He opens the car’s trunk, finding Alison’s body inside. Shadow figures out that Hinzelmann is actually a dark god who sacrifices a child each year so that Lakeside can prosper. Hinzelmann admits this, and Chad Mulligan overhears and kills Hinzelmann. With the Lakeside mystery solved, Shadow goes to Chicago to fulfill his promise and let Czernobog hit him with his hammer. Czernobog lets Shadow live, now that spring is here and Czernbog is turning into his kinder identity, Bielebog. Shadow, finally free, goes to Reykjavik, Iceland, where he meets an older incarnation of Odin, his father.

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One of the Most Conservative State Supreme Courts in the Country Just Rebuked Dobbs

The Utah Supreme Court, a body with a clear conservative majority , surprised many observers last week when it handed down a ruling blocking enforcement of the state’s new abortion ban , which criminalizes virtually all abortions from the moment of fertilization . The law, which was set to go into effect in 2022, was blocked by a trial court while the litigation continued, a decision affirmed by the state Supreme Court last week. The Utah decision is not just a reminder that conservative judges faced with the prospect of retention elections may be afraid to gut abortion rights; it also spotlights the chaos and confusion produced by the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision undoing a right to choose abortion—and problems with using history and tradition as the only guide to identifying our most cherished rights.

Utah fought the lower court injunction by stressing the kind of argument the U.S. Supreme Court’s supermajority made in reversing Roe v. Wade : arguing that there could be no right to abortion rooted in Utah’s history and tradition because Utah law had long criminalized abortion, and that the rationale of the Dobbs ruling dismantling the federal right to abortion applied here at the state level. The judges of the Utah Supreme Court agreed that the state’s constitution should be interpreted as conservative judges often suggest—in line with “what constitutional language meant to Utahns when it entered the constitution.” But the fact that the state court embraced originalism did not mean that it was ready to let Utah’s ban go into effect.

The relevant question, the court asked, was which broad principles would have been recognized by state residents when the state’s constitution was established. Utahans might not have recognized or even thought about a right to abortion per se, but that was not the point. Looking for too direct an analogue, the court reasoned, was unnecessary or even perverse. “Failure to distinguish between principles and application of those principles,” the court reasoned, “would hold constitutional protections hostage to the prejudices of the 1890s.”

Even the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority seems aware of the problem that Utah’s high court identified. In Rahimi v. United States , the court dodged a potentially disastrous ruling that the Second Amendment made it unconstitutional to deny access to a firearm to someone who posed a credible threat of violence to his partner or minor child. The question was not whether the United States could identify a regulation exactly like the one Zackey Rahimi was challenging; instead, the court would focus on whether the “challenged regulation is consistent with the principles that underpin the Nation’s regulatory tradition.”

The Utah decision shows that the Supreme Court may have assigned itself a sort of Hobson’s choice: binding itself to the biases of the 19 th century or embracing a looser, principle-driven approach that is quite different from the vision of history and tradition the conservative justices have embraced.

The Utah court also highlighted how much the Supreme Court hasn’t told us about how a history-and-tradition test works—and how differently judges can approach it. Dobbs suggests that there can’t be a right to abortion given that states in the 19 th century criminalized abortion (albeit, in some cases, many years after the relevant constitutional provision came into effect). The Utah court thought that it isn’t so simple. The judges tried to account for what regular people, including those who could not vote at the time, thought about which rights were protected. The majority, for example, stressed evidence including a book written by a female doctor about the beliefs and practices of Utah women in the 1890s, and acknowledged that regular Americans might have believed that abortion was moral and even legal before quickening, the point at which fetal movement could be detected, even as criminal laws sometimes eliminated that distinction. There are other unanswered questions too. What is the relationship between originalism or history and tradition—and how much do the conservative justices care about history from after the relevant constitutional provision is put in place? What kinds of evidence count—and from which time periods? Can a court pay attention to those who were marginalized at that time or only those with power in the era to write their views into law?

The Utah decision shows how unstable Dobbs is—and how easy it is for courts to use historical evidence to reach their preferred results. Looking to history and tradition does not absolve judges of responsibility for making decisions that are unpopular or unjust because, as the Utah court recognized, historical analysis allows courts so much flexibility to decide whose history matters and why. It is not the founders who make choices about when and how to look at the past. It is the judges faced with the critical questions of today. Dobbs promised that history would constrain a court that might want to dabble in politics. In truth, as the Utah decision implies , Dobbs treats history as “a type of Rorschach test where we only see what we are already inclined to see .”

How to cite ChatGPT

Use discount code STYLEBLOG15 for 15% off APA Style print products with free shipping in the United States.

We, the APA Style team, are not robots. We can all pass a CAPTCHA test , and we know our roles in a Turing test . And, like so many nonrobot human beings this year, we’ve spent a fair amount of time reading, learning, and thinking about issues related to large language models, artificial intelligence (AI), AI-generated text, and specifically ChatGPT . We’ve also been gathering opinions and feedback about the use and citation of ChatGPT. Thank you to everyone who has contributed and shared ideas, opinions, research, and feedback.

In this post, I discuss situations where students and researchers use ChatGPT to create text and to facilitate their research, not to write the full text of their paper or manuscript. We know instructors have differing opinions about how or even whether students should use ChatGPT, and we’ll be continuing to collect feedback about instructor and student questions. As always, defer to instructor guidelines when writing student papers. For more about guidelines and policies about student and author use of ChatGPT, see the last section of this post.

Quoting or reproducing the text created by ChatGPT in your paper

If you’ve used ChatGPT or other AI tools in your research, describe how you used the tool in your Method section or in a comparable section of your paper. For literature reviews or other types of essays or response or reaction papers, you might describe how you used the tool in your introduction. In your text, provide the prompt you used and then any portion of the relevant text that was generated in response.

Unfortunately, the results of a ChatGPT “chat” are not retrievable by other readers, and although nonretrievable data or quotations in APA Style papers are usually cited as personal communications , with ChatGPT-generated text there is no person communicating. Quoting ChatGPT’s text from a chat session is therefore more like sharing an algorithm’s output; thus, credit the author of the algorithm with a reference list entry and the corresponding in-text citation.

When prompted with “Is the left brain right brain divide real or a metaphor?” the ChatGPT-generated text indicated that although the two brain hemispheres are somewhat specialized, “the notation that people can be characterized as ‘left-brained’ or ‘right-brained’ is considered to be an oversimplification and a popular myth” (OpenAI, 2023).

OpenAI. (2023). ChatGPT (Mar 14 version) [Large language model]. https://chat.openai.com/chat

You may also put the full text of long responses from ChatGPT in an appendix of your paper or in online supplemental materials, so readers have access to the exact text that was generated. It is particularly important to document the exact text created because ChatGPT will generate a unique response in each chat session, even if given the same prompt. If you create appendices or supplemental materials, remember that each should be called out at least once in the body of your APA Style paper.

When given a follow-up prompt of “What is a more accurate representation?” the ChatGPT-generated text indicated that “different brain regions work together to support various cognitive processes” and “the functional specialization of different regions can change in response to experience and environmental factors” (OpenAI, 2023; see Appendix A for the full transcript).

Creating a reference to ChatGPT or other AI models and software

The in-text citations and references above are adapted from the reference template for software in Section 10.10 of the Publication Manual (American Psychological Association, 2020, Chapter 10). Although here we focus on ChatGPT, because these guidelines are based on the software template, they can be adapted to note the use of other large language models (e.g., Bard), algorithms, and similar software.

The reference and in-text citations for ChatGPT are formatted as follows:

• Parenthetical citation: (OpenAI, 2023)
• Narrative citation: OpenAI (2023)

Let’s break that reference down and look at the four elements (author, date, title, and source):

Author: The author of the model is OpenAI.

Date: The date is the year of the version you used. Following the template in Section 10.10, you need to include only the year, not the exact date. The version number provides the specific date information a reader might need.

Title: The name of the model is “ChatGPT,” so that serves as the title and is italicized in your reference, as shown in the template. Although OpenAI labels unique iterations (i.e., ChatGPT-3, ChatGPT-4), they are using “ChatGPT” as the general name of the model, with updates identified with version numbers.

The version number is included after the title in parentheses. The format for the version number in ChatGPT references includes the date because that is how OpenAI is labeling the versions. Different large language models or software might use different version numbering; use the version number in the format the author or publisher provides, which may be a numbering system (e.g., Version 2.0) or other methods.

Bracketed text is used in references for additional descriptions when they are needed to help a reader understand what’s being cited. References for a number of common sources, such as journal articles and books, do not include bracketed descriptions, but things outside of the typical peer-reviewed system often do. In the case of a reference for ChatGPT, provide the descriptor “Large language model” in square brackets. OpenAI describes ChatGPT-4 as a “large multimodal model,” so that description may be provided instead if you are using ChatGPT-4. Later versions and software or models from other companies may need different descriptions, based on how the publishers describe the model. The goal of the bracketed text is to briefly describe the kind of model to your reader.

Source: When the publisher name and the author name are the same, do not repeat the publisher name in the source element of the reference, and move directly to the URL. This is the case for ChatGPT. The URL for ChatGPT is https://chat.openai.com/chat . For other models or products for which you may create a reference, use the URL that links as directly as possible to the source (i.e., the page where you can access the model, not the publisher’s homepage).

Other questions about citing ChatGPT

You may have noticed the confidence with which ChatGPT described the ideas of brain lateralization and how the brain operates, without citing any sources. I asked for a list of sources to support those claims and ChatGPT provided five references—four of which I was able to find online. The fifth does not seem to be a real article; the digital object identifier given for that reference belongs to a different article, and I was not able to find any article with the authors, date, title, and source details that ChatGPT provided. Authors using ChatGPT or similar AI tools for research should consider making this scrutiny of the primary sources a standard process. If the sources are real, accurate, and relevant, it may be better to read those original sources to learn from that research and paraphrase or quote from those articles, as applicable, than to use the model’s interpretation of them.

We’ve also received a number of other questions about ChatGPT. Should students be allowed to use it? What guidelines should instructors create for students using AI? Does using AI-generated text constitute plagiarism? Should authors who use ChatGPT credit ChatGPT or OpenAI in their byline? What are the copyright implications ?

On these questions, researchers, editors, instructors, and others are actively debating and creating parameters and guidelines. Many of you have sent us feedback, and we encourage you to continue to do so in the comments below. We will also study the policies and procedures being established by instructors, publishers, and academic institutions, with a goal of creating guidelines that reflect the many real-world applications of AI-generated text.

For questions about manuscript byline credit, plagiarism, and related ChatGPT and AI topics, the APA Style team is seeking the recommendations of APA Journals editors. APA Style guidelines based on those recommendations will be posted on this blog and on the APA Style site later this year.

Update: APA Journals has published policies on the use of generative AI in scholarly materials .

We, the APA Style team humans, appreciate your patience as we navigate these unique challenges and new ways of thinking about how authors, researchers, and students learn, write, and work with new technologies.

American Psychological Association. (2020). Publication manual of the American Psychological Association (7th ed.). https://doi.org/10.1037/0000165-000

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