“Call no man happy until he is dead.”
When Low Key questions Shadow if he is happy knowing that he is soon to be released, Shadow answers with the above mentioned quote. Through this, Shadow distinguishes himself as both a pessimist and an exceptional character. He does not believe in happiness in the real sense and is aware of the fact that someone can’t be happy during his life because he will always have to face difficulties. If someone is in prison or not influences too little a person’s happiness in Shadow’s point of view.
“kinds of behavior that work in a specialized environment, such as a prison, can fail to work and in fact become harmful when used outside such an environment”
After being released, Shadow thinks about a fellow inmate named Johnnie who was released some time before him. Johnnie went to the airport but was not allowed to board a plane because he did not have a valid act of identification. Enraged, he tried to hold a gas station with a toy gun and thus was arrested once more. Shadow thinks about Johnnie’s situation and how he was unable to adapt to a new situation. Shadow stresses the idea that a behavior considered appropriate in one place can be considered completely inappropriate somewhere else and a person must be willing to adapt in order to live in peace and harmony with those around him.
“Every hour wounds. The last one kills.”
The quote appears at the beginning of the third chapter, after Shadow found about Mechanical Boy. The quote wants to suggest that as time passes by, the old Gods die. Instead of gaining more power and followers, they are soon forgotten and replaced by new Gods and deities. But the quote can be applied to humans as well as there is no one who can escape time and eventually death. Also, as time passes, things become increasingly more difficult to deal with and each period of time in a person’s life leaves a mark and a wound that never heals completely.
"The important thing to understand about American history, wrote Mr. Ibis in his leather-bound journal, is that it is fictional, a charcoal-sketched simplicity for the children, or the easily bored. For the most part it is uninspected, unimagined, unthought, a representation of the thing, and not the thing itself."
This quote lends itself to the lenses of New Historicism and Post-Colonial Criticism. New Historicists might inquire about interpretations of American history and what these portrayals of America say about their interpreters. Similarly, Post-Colonial critics might examine the events and perspectives that are historicized to better understand the power dynamics that have been perpetuated in the simplification of American history. Further, this quote serves as an example of how Gaiman depicts American values, and it echoes of deconstructionism.
“A small boy sat inches away from the television set, a video of the Disney Hercules playing, an animated satyr stomping and shouting his way across the screen."
This quote pinpoints the way that traditional beliefs have been modernized. Hercules is no longer an important mythological figure; he is a Disney character, animated and bowdlerized for the eyes of children. Native Americans and immigrants to America possessed their own gods, myths, and superstitions, but they have been abandoned, forgotten, or made more appealing to the largely monotheistic mainstream taste. Though this was not entirely the result of colonialism, it was the result of the colonial mindset, which contends that some people are the colonizers and other people are the colonized. Some (most) of the various cultural beliefs were left behind (oppressed), and the colonists (white Europeans) gained control over the American cultural belief system.
“I’m doing fine. On my festival days they still feast on eggs and rabbits, on candy and on flesh, to represent rebirth and copulation. They wear flowers in their bonnets and they give each other flowers. They do it in my name. More and more of them every year. In my name, old wolf."
Gaiman identifies another example of how Americans have degraded tradition by modernizing and Americanizing them with his depiction of Easter. Easter is the Germanic goddess Ēostre, or Ostara, and she is sustained by the fact that her name is associated with a Christian holiday. However, as Wednesday points out, this is merely the appearance of belief. This is somewhat similar to the way that Hercules was made into a Disney movie. The Easter celebration already existed, so the dominant religion chose to adopt it and make it into a celebration of their own. This quote demonstrates the bastardization of old beliefs in America.
