47 pages • 1 hour read
Anansi Boys
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Background
Mythological Context: Trickster Archetypes
Anansi, the eponymous character in Gaiman’s novel, is a mythological figure from West African folklore (originally attributed to the Asante people from the region that now comprises Ghana and the Ivory Coast). Anansi was believed to be both trickster and teacher, known as the god or king of stories. Unlike many other gods from his pantheon, Anansi was prized for his cunning. Gaiman effectively explores this facet of Anansi’s character as the narration reveals what happened when storytelling moved from Tiger’s domain to Anansi’s: People started thinking their way out of problems instead of hacking their way out. Curiously, Anansi is popular culture’s most enduring figure of West African myth—a fitting legacy for the god of stories.
The novel makes several mentions of another mythological trickster figure, Brer Rabbit. The book’s narrator equates them to the same being. There is some truth to this, as West African immigrants brought their Anansi stories to America and retold many of them with a new protagonist. This illustrates an important truth of oral traditional storytelling: Though the names, shapes, and places of the trickster might change, the trickster archetype is universal. We see them recurring throughout cultures, taking the shape of Loki in Norse mythology, Hermes in Greek myth, Coyote and Raven in Indigenous American myths, Reynard the Fox in French folklore, Robin Hood in British folklore, and countless others. Carl Jung even includes the trickster figure as one of his cultural archetypes.
What this tells us is that there’s a universality to this specific archetype that endures across generations and continents, even if the names shift and fade. This is largely because, in the expanse of larger-than-life godly figures, tricksters are most like us. Gaiman describes Anansi as a being made up of contradictions—neither good nor evil, foolish nor infallible, blessed with a mind that gets him both into and out of trouble. While most of us can’t aspire to be as strong as Thor or as beautiful as Aphrodite, we can try to have the presence of mind and charm of Anansi. Even when tricksters are presented as the villain of a particular narrative, we can’t help but admire them. Gaiman brings this character to life by giving him more depth and agency but is loyal to the original West African myth.
Literary Context: Neil Gaiman’s Storytelling World
Anansi Boys is set in the same larger world as Gaiman’s American Gods. Although American Gods was released four years earlier in 2001, the idea for Anansi Boys was conceived first—though it didn’t become a finished product until a few years later. Anansi is a minor character in American Gods. There is also a connection between these stories and Gaiman’s Sandman comics; one of the characters from Sandman, Delirium, makes a brief appearance in American Gods, which suggests that several of Gaiman’s works connect across the same world. Sandman itself features an “anything goes” attitude and incorporates an impressive spectrum of world mythologies, which open doors to a range of other work including Gaiman’s Stardust.
A more thematic connection between Anansi Boys and Sandman is the idea of shaping the world through a facet of storytelling and will. In Anansi Boys, Charlie learns he can sing his future into being, shaping the very building blocks of his world with song. In Sandman, a similar magic is associated with the power of dreams. The standalone issue “A Dream of a Thousand Cats” expresses this idea literally when a feline traveler explains to an audience that a shared dream rewrote the fabric of the world and encourages them to do it again. Although expressed differently, song and dream are two catalysts for the same idea.
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By Neil Gaiman
