I ought to have been doing what I enjoy doing and am good at, like writing. Clearly, the real world seemed so barren to me than that the world of the mind had become my greener pastures — Hu Anyan, I Deliver Parcels in Beijing

I. Delivering Smiles!

On Christmas Eve 2022 I climbed to the 8th floor of a Jersey City apartment building to deliver an Amazon package. The customer who answered the door was a young man about my age, wearing Gucci slides. By his legs were two toddlers staring up at me, eating ice cream (it was 10:00 A.M). I held out the package— he pulled out his phone and started filming me.

“Can you take a few steps back and walk towards me again with the box?”

I thought about the blocked cars on the street level that had probably, by now, lined up behind my parked, unoccupied truck.

“Amazon guy’s here! What did Daddy get you guys??” he said.

I threw the package at his chest and pivoted for the stairs, walking past the open elevator that held a hierarchy of another Amazon driver, a UPS driver, and a Door Dash E-biker.

Outside, my fears were confirmed: heads hung out of car windows incredulously, tilted at my unmanned truck, and then at me, as I stumbled over snowbanks wearing my TOGETHER, WE DELIVER SMILES hoodie, the work phone’s charging cord tangled around my leg, under my ass, through my crotch and into my hoodie pocket that held the portable charger. I saw that the phone’s battery had increased from 13% to 14%. The Amazon Flex app said I had just completed stop 20 out of 195 for the day. My boss texted that I had already fallen 7 steps behind.

Outside, the unrelenting cacophony of horns behind me grew, and grew. I fell into the driver’s seat and hit the gas.

“Driving infraction: seat belt”, the feminine voice told me from the truck’s camera.

I parked and grabbed the seatbelt’s metal buckle, but before I could strap myself in, another horn erupted from behind, and that is all it took for 4 years of simmering to finally reach its boil. I wound up and launched the buckle without any aim or direction, and before I realized what had happened, the taught, frozen glass of the driver side window shattered epically into sand, onto the street and onto me. Those behind me exited their cars and approached cautiously, scared.

But there was no time to spare. I hit the gas and sped off, already being behind on my route. I spent the rest of the day gripping the steering wheel with my frozen knuckles curled beneath the sleeves of my hoodie, wondering how I’d explain the empty window frame to my boss, and every time I went to the back to grab a package, my boots crunched over glass. Merry Christmas!

After 6 years of delivering Amazon packages for two different DSP’s (Delivery Service Providers— Amazon contracts third-party logistics companies to carry out their deliveries), I had earned my college degree and moved on to teach high school English. I had completed over 1500 routes, and delivered just over 650,000 packages.

I truly loved many parts of that job. I liked seeing different places, travelling to the deepest recesses of New Jersey and Staten Island, many of the towns mysteriously beautiful and dark. Each place kept its novelty, allowing me to remain a tourist, seeing it in a new light, because just as I’d become familiar and entrenched, I’d be moved somewhere new. I liked seeing towns change through the seasons. I liked letting my body enter a mechanical overdrive, freeing my mind to wander. I liked being alone. I liked listening to music. You would not believe the amounts of music I listened to; it was in this period of life that it meant the most to me, where I relied on it, and the experiences of listening to certain projects was most vivid and formative. Being in Staten Island’s Stapleton Heights in December, traversing castle-like-churches and winding hills is synonymous in my memory with the icy Kid A album cover.

I also fucking hated that job. Its demands tiptoed the line of labor abuse, never quite crossing it. It was designed to burn people out— most drivers didn’t last a month. There was no pride between us veterans who had been there for years— just an unspoken recognition, maybe even embarrassment, that we had to have been either batshit crazy or lacking in self-respect to make it this long.

When we did a route quickly (sometimes we just wanted to go home, or in my case, make it to night class) we’d be punished because the algorithm would register our overperformance as the new standard and pile on more packages the next day. There was nobody to complain to about this. When I’d return at night ready to search the warehouse and kill whoever was responsible for making my route, the only answer we would get from the lanyard-donning Amazon employee, his glasses lit up by the glow of his laptop, would be “the route is created by the algorithm”. More than once when I returned from my route, my boss took one look at me and asked if I was OK. I hadn’t realized that my eyes had settled into an uneasy rabidity, my jaw locked into a scowl. The job was making me angry.

Then we’d each storm home, shower, sleep, and return in the morning, chatting in the parking lot and eating our Jersey bagels, laughing about who would get the most fucked that day as if we weren’t just swearing off the job 12 hours ago. Hint: it wasn’t whoever’s first stop was 3 SQUIRREL RUN. We all knew what that route was just by that address: wide roads, green lawns, front steps with signs that read To Our Delivery Heroes: We Appreciate You over baskets stuffed with water and snacks. This was a lot different than 1550 MAIN ST 3rd FLOOR BRING TO RECEPTION.

When I started the job, I weighed 220 lbs. When I finished: 179 lbs. We’d drink gallons of water but never have to piss; we’d sweat it all out instead. It turns out physical abuse gets you into tremendous shape. But these few details scratch just the surface of what the job was actually like, and it would require a book to thoroughly detail all of its absurdity.

II. Working Class Literature (?)

Before I quit, I told another driver about my idea of writing a novel that featured a disillusioned Amazon driver as its protagonist. “That already exists”, he said. “It’s called The Post Office”. I then went and read Bukowski’s The Post Office, his 1971 debut novel. It was ok. Although I understand what my coworker was saying, it was not the novel I was describing. I was imagining a certain brand of alienation and isolation that I had felt at the job.

After The Post Office, I kept going, seeking out what I was blindly labeling as “working-class” fiction: accessible prose; sometimes pathetic, profane antiheroes who narrate their small town failures and triumphs; squalid settings; and more often than not: desperate workers pitted against tyrannical overlords. I read authors in adjacent, if not similar, styles: Barry Hannah, John Fante. I read their favorite writers: the 1890 Norwegian novel Hunger by Hamsun being the best of the bunch.

Still a new reader, I looked for contemporary examples of grounded prose that seemed effortless, natural. I read an excerpt of ‘s The Walk Book published in The Paris Review, whose realist descriptions of finding refuge in various McDonalds’ along his walk felt new, but still linked him somehow to what I’d been reading. His writing led me to other writers like , Scott McClanahan and . I discovered literary magazines and writers like . Then I found the internet novel, realizing how quickly I had strewn from Bukowski. What had simply happened was that my definition of who a writer was, or what literature could be, had broadly expanded, and I had taken an interest in a voice that was less elevated and more colloquial than the first layer of commercial literature. But as far as I could tell, the book about the alienated, post-2020 Amazon driver did not yet exist.

I realized that my aspirations to be a “working-class” writer were not original, and that writers, as long as there had been a publishing establishment, have been marketing their writing as “for the streets”. Besides, what is meant by “working-class literature”? Writers from humble backgrounds? Writers who worked blue-collar jobs as they wrote? Stories about blue collar workers? Most writers and characters are working-class. The label needs defining.

Yet, I was still looking for something specific —stories that depicted protagonists dehumanized by labor— writing that, although it may indirectly take aim at the boot pressed down on the back, ultimately, is more interested in how the work effects the worker, and how the worker resists and survives; often, the character does it through writing. This makes sense, given that many of the authors mentioned above create characters who are nearly identical to themselves.

It makes perfect sense to me why this tradition lives on. It seems especially appealing to young writers looking for a voice, who realize that familiar language can extinguish the pressure to fabricate their own style. And what do you know better than your own experience? It’s appealing, especially when the label of fiction shields the author, allowing them to borrow from and manipulate a wealth of lived experience where necessary.

Or maybe, you work these shitty jobs and you quit. You walk away with nothing to show for it: no connections, no money, no promise that the next thing is going to be any better, and no skills other than niche, meaningless knowledge. The only thing you have to celebrate is that you are still standing. To give it meaning, you write. This is how The Post Office ends: the freshly retired Henry Chinaski wakes up from a bender and decides that he’s going to write a book about his career as a mailman.

Recently, I found that someone had already written the book I’d planned. In 2025 Astra House published an English translation of Hu Anyan’s debut nonfiction memoir I Deliver Parcels in Beijing. 2 million copies had already been sold in China. I bought it immediately after reading the summary:

I Deliver Parcels in Beijing chronicles the author's grueling, low-wage experiences in China's gig economy across nearly two decades, focusing sharply on the physical toll, routine, and quiet resilience required to survive as an urban courier.

I was in awe that someone would publish it, and most surprisingly, that over 2 million people would read it.

III. I Deliver Parcels in Beijing by Hu Anyan

When I Deliver Parcels in Beijing begins, we’re given no information about the author— not his age, background, or anything personal. He’s a fly on the wall at the night shift in a logistics warehouse, letting glimpses of his personality appear only through his observations of the job. We don’t know that this warehouse job at the focus of Part I is actually towards the chronological end of his 19-job timeline, and that after Part II, which shares the memoir’s title and is dedicated to his time as a parcel courier, Hu will return to the beginning of his nomadic march through a life of work.

It is truly a memoir about work, an account committed to the minutia of all things related to each job Hu holds, including but not limited to: bicycle salesman, convenience store clerk, bakery apprentice, gas station attendant, security guard. In the final pages, where Hu enters a more reflective mode (these rare moments come as a welcome reprieve from the merciless, industrial churn that constitutes the bulk of the memoir), Hu explains that he was encouraged by his editor to flesh out his writing with “descriptions of working methods, processes, and the workplaces and setting I was in. This background is crucial to understanding my circumstances and many of the decisions I made at the time”.

This is how it should’ve been written. Tedium is the nature of these jobs, where success requires a controlled optimization of many seemingly inconsequential variables. On my first day of shadowing at Amazon, I didn’t understand the driver’s insistence on seemingly petty practices: which hand to grab a package with, which foot to step back into the truck with, when and when not to go to the McDonald’s drive thru; until I quickly learned it was necessary if I wanted to stay on pace with Amazon’s impossible standard. Hu’s recall for minutia is impressive, which may be a testament to the physical repetition of this kind of work, and how its movements brand themselves into your brain. I remember what it was like to lay in bed after a 6-day stretch of working: the same way you can feel the ocean’s phantom tides pull you after a day at the beach, I’d drift to sleep, finding my arms wanting to shadow the procedure of: put the gear stick in park, right hand grabs phone, grab seat to turn, left hand grabs package.

Although Hu includes these details for us to understand his motives, we don’t know his ultimate goal. We’re given the image of someone constantly in motion, whose each thought is geared towards productivity or cost-efficiency, and whose urgent need to survive gives him myopia, blinding him from seeing beyond the task at hand. But as he pinballs, his way of life begins to border absurdity: to each new job and city Hu brings the same attitude, treating each as a temporary, parallel stepping stone to the next flimsy stepping stone. We wonder when he’s going to take a step back and consider a path out of the cycle.

Although Hu’s account does expose unfair labor practices, it doesn’t seem to be its primary concern. His tone is far from angry and is instead one of level-headed acceptance. He doesn’t show any signs of being anti-capitalistic or even anti-authority, and rarely does he question the power imbalance that he’s on the wrong side of. This though, happens by accident. He’s a good worker and he’s cooperative. On the other side of this same coin lies his curse: Hu is too fearful to make himself visible, let alone impose himself and challenge authority. This makes him the perfect employee. He often references his low self-esteem:

I have always cared a lot about other’s views of me — in the past, it’s been a source of significant anxiety and frustration. Hearing others talk about me behind my back, especially when it was baseless slander, I would feel downtrodden. It brought on an overwhelming urge to prove my innocence.

No anecdote serves as a better microcosm for Hu’s M.O to shrink than his time working at the bicycle shop, where he keeps his mouth shut about the other employees who regularly steal expensive equipment, somehow walking the tightrope to retain his friendships with his coworkers while remaining his boss’s favorite.

If there is one job that Hu does take pride in, however, it is being a parcel courier. There is something unexpectedly intimate about the work. He bonds with the other drivers. He becomes entrenched in the daily goings-on of each assigned neighborhood, learning through repetition the intricacies of each one’s geography and social life. Even his interactions with customers—often petty squabbles over lost packages—help alleviate his social anxiety and isolation. One of Hu’s only moments of genuine nostalgia and sentimentality comes in his final days on the job as the company goes out of business. Reading his memoir as strictly a condemnation of labor exploitation is complicated by Hu’s pride in the quality of his work:

Before I left the job, I posted on my WeChat Moments so only customers could see, informing them about Pinjun Express’s dissolution, and that I wouldn’t be taking on Vipshop deliveries in the future. Lots of customers commented, praising my attitude, and thanking me for my longstanding service. It improved my assessment of my work, slightly— I was under the impression I’d done abysmally. One customer wrote, “You’re the hardest working and most responsible courier I’ve seen.” […] So, I’d like to sum up my time as a courier as follows, and it’s no exaggeration: I was once the best courier that some customers had ever seen.

Hu does eventually find his breath and makes an effort to to pursue art. He falls into an apprenticeship as an illustrator for a comic book publisher, where he meets artists who expose him to new ideas— a sort of enlightenment that launches us into the final part of the memoir— and it is in this deliberate cultivation of his interior life that Hu comes to accept work and establish the very identity that led him to write the memoir. For him, writing is his mind’s world of “greener pastures” where he can escape his “barren” life of work.

He and his colleagues eventually quit over creative differences with the publishing company. Years later, he and a friend move to Vietnam to conduct research and start their own magazine. He discovers punk rock and begins writing journal entries on its ethos. He begins reading classic American literature and tries to imitate James Joyce’s style after reading Ulysses, before eventually giving up and settling into his more comfortable “internet-novel” register. He is drawn to Hemingway and the iceberg theory:

This was a significant lesson for me to learn early on in my writing experiments. The unwritten part is where the enormity and weight of a story should reside; and the art of story writing is in expressing with as few words and images as possible limitless thought and feeling.

I’m unsure if this influence made its way into I Deliver Parcels in Beijing. On one hand, Hu presents the stark facts of his work, leaving out extended arguments either because it is too obvious of a commentary, or he doesn’t see his predicament as being unjust — I feel like it’s closer to the second thing.

Hu reconciles the conflict between work and freedom by accepting work as an inescapable certainty of life, allocating it as a time distinct from free time. He takes a pragmatic case for art in the life of the worker:

“They invested their every moment in Beijing into earning money, and it is no great mystery how hard that is. But what was it that drove them to do this, made them willing to sacrifice so much? Maybe the answer varied from person to person. But, supposing work is something we are compelled to do, a concession of our personal will, then the other parts of life — those that remain true to our desires, that we choose to purse, in whatever form they take — might be called freedom.

Hu rejects the social expectation to conflate occupation with identity. He shares his frustration that pleasantries with strangers are often incited by the question, “So what do you do for work?” I remember never wanting to tell people that I was an Amazon driver in conversations; it was not my identity, and their reaction was almost always deflating. What must’ve gone wrong in this otherwise seemingly normal guy for him to be doing that? I’d read on their faces, before thinking about what lengths I must go to prove my worth.

Hu says that even when people claim to love their job, that “Such statements, even when true, are still one-sided — there are ways outside of work to do what interests us, spend time with the people we like, and lead fulfilling lives.” If there are two distinct and separate sides of life, it is the part of Hu’s life that isn’t work that he keeps most in the dark. Perhaps the most honest parts about his memoir is where he admits his dishonesty:

I have been sharing my work experiences here, and it’s difficult, doing that, not to touch upon other sides of life. They are all so intertwined that to only talk about one part of the whole experience runs the risk of misleading readers. But there are things I am willing to share, and some things I don’t want to, so I suppose it’s a risk I’m taking.

If Hu is going to try to shed himself from the identity of a worker, to include how it impacts his personal life would be to blur the lines between the two sides. Yet, it is Hu’s identity as a worker that makes him a writer — not just in the experiences that become the subject of his memoir— but that the experiences shape the very worldview that pushes him to write. As Henry Chinaski does in the conclusion of The Post Office, Hu picks himself off the mat and validates the years of work by writing about it. I Deliver Parcels in Beijing searches for what Studs Terkel writes in the introduction to his famous 1974 oral history Working, a compilation of hundreds of interviews with American workers:

It was clear to me early in the year that the majority of my students weren’t regularly exposed to literature, let alone choosing to engage with it voluntarily. Many of them struggled to name a novel they either loved or hated, or even one they were required to read for school within the last year. The cause for this vanishing literacy has been discussed ad nauseum; besides, look around, and you will see the cause. It is in front of us in plain sight. I hate to be a “it’s the phones” guy, clenching my fist and waving it at the sky, but it is hard for me to not go there.

When I was 15-years-old, I preferred playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II to reading. So this preference for digital entertainment, to me, seems natural for a teenager. And when I became a serious reader again — almost a decade later at the age of 24— it took me a long time to rebuild my stamina. But kids today, suffocated by an onslaught of digital content that projects from the palm of their hand, are given far less of a chance than I was given. The real problem, however, is the way in which schools have responded to declining literary and student-engagement. Not only have we lowered our standards and expectations, but we’ve placed too great an emphasis on “student engagement”, desperately trying to hook them by turning education into entertainment. By doing so, we have failed our students.

I didn’t like what literacy’s nosedive had done to the way I viewed my students. The ideal teacher observes a weakness in their students and responds with understanding and empathy. I, on the other hand, respond with a quiet, closeted resentment that I harbor in the depth of my soul.

I ask a fairly easy question about the plot of what we just read, and the class falls silent. This compounds with what I hear on the radio driving into work: “Latest study confirms that Gen-Z is less cognitively capable than other generations”. Consequently, I see my students as vapid, pathetic vessels because anger is an easy emotion to partake in. I think to myself that there is an ocean-sized gap between me and them, and that I’m not willing to be the one to do the hard work of fixing them.

Walt Hunter, professor of English at Case Western Reserve University, writes similarly about how he felt going into his year of teaching in his recent article “Stop Meeting Students Where They Are” for The Atlantic:

“Anecdotes and statistics about the decline of reading unsettled me. Plus, I was worried about my own raddled attention span, and I was unnerved by the apparent inevitability of AI-generated essays.”

There are multiple societal forces actively working against today’s English teacher, and because of the nature of the subject, these forces are felt sharply by the English teacher as an attack on humanity, an attack on thoughtful conversation, and an attack on connection.

In recent weeks, my colleague has returned to work from maternity leave to co-teach my class. I was eager to see her fresh perspective. In her first week back, she observed the same woodenness and quietness in my students that I’ve been facing all year.

We are doing a unit on poetry, and I thought we’d look at some Shakespearean sonnets. One day, she looked at Sonnet 18 with them, and said that they struggled to understand it. I fully expected this and was not surprised. I knew that the sonnets would be near impossible for them to read; that’s why I only wanted to have them read a few. Whatever gaps they had I would fill in with my explanation, and we would move on.

My co-teacher came up with an idea. She said to me: “I’m going to project a Shakespearean sonnet on the board that you have never seen before. They are going to watch you struggle through it, and they are going to see what it takes to authentically annotate something to attempt to understand it”.

This was a good idea because it targeted a pitfall of my teaching: that I already know the answer— a predetermined answer I want my students to come to. Therefore, when I ask the class a question, they are aware that there is an answer in my head I want them to arrive at. This method can stifle students’ voice.

So, I stood at the front of the classroom that day, feeling exposed, sight-reading Shakespearean sonnets. With most of the sonnets, I, with the help of the class, could only get to about 75% understanding and accuracy at best. But my confusion — my apparent struggle and frustration in understanding each new sonnet— was key for my students. They felt free to posit their interpretations and even to disagree with me.

In each session, a student shared a thought or possibility that not only I had failed to see but was also ultimately accurate. One student couldn’t wipe the smile off her face when she figured out a metaphor that stumped both me and my co-teacher. “This was fun”, she and her classmate said to each other when the bell rang. In my class of over-achievers, they laughed at me as I stood in the front of the classroom wiping the sweat off my brow: “This is pissing me off”, I said, as they were sharing comments that were more insightful and useful than mine.

In his article “Stop Meeting Students Where They Are”, Walt Hunter writes about his new approach for having his college students write. He wanted his students to participate in real-time, adrenaline-driven writing that opened itself up to failure. Writing that forced them to face their fear without the scaffolding of drafting, planning, or AI:

I devised simple essay topics that asked students to write about their own difficulties as readers. One was: “Write about a moment in an Emily Dickinson poem that you don’t understand.” […]. John Keats called this state of being “negative capability,” a condition in which the writer learns to live in a perpetual state of uncertainty. If it was really true that the students couldn’t read, then it was up to me to put the books in their way and make them deal with them.

Hunter’s experience confirms my instinct that this is the only way out of the darkness. Rather than throwing our hands up and hiding the challenging stuff from our students, we need to double down on it as the cure. Rather than giving them short-form, comfortable content and meeting them where they are (many English teachers now refrain from teaching the full-length novel, opting for excerpts and only short stories) we need to “stop somewhere ahead and wait for them to catch up”, as Walt Whitman once said.

All the while, it’s useful to normalize the struggle of reading, emphasizing the process, not the product, of close-reading and confusion. We have to then use our writing to pull ourselves out of the darkness. There’s a detectable apprehension that pervades my students. We need to destroy that need to be perfect, that need to have the right answer right away— one that has been conditioned by the Chromebooks and AI we have handed to each of them.

The more I hear about teachers jumping through hoops to make AI “educational” in the English classroom, the more I believe that a full retreat into wilderness — a return to simplicity— is the best answer. Schools place multiple degrees of separation between the student and the page, forgetting that the bare literature itself is the answer to the problem. Give them a pencil, a paper, and a book, and see what happens.

My co-teacher and I have replaced our students’ Chromebooks with dusty, heavy, and monstrous dictionaries. Raised with Chromebooks, to them, the dictionary becomes the new, alluring technology. In another assignment in which students rifled through piles of magazines, digging for “found poetry”, many of them were delayed from starting the assignment because they were too enthralled in the physical tactility of the medium. They sat in silence, flipping through the pages, pointing out things they found amusing to one another.

In the quiet pauses that ring throughout my classroom, I question if any of these kids have ever actually been in a class that revolves around stimulating discussion. Or did they glide through their experience using ChatGPT to generate any kind of written response? Did they mostly spend class time sitting in silence looking at their Chromebooks? Did class mostly consist of clicking away at pre-loaded, “gamified” activities from learning software that teachers are told to use in order to justify the district’s purchase? Ask any of my students what they think of IXL Learning —the software our school pushes on them — and they hate it. When I was student-teaching, I thought it odd the teachers’ reliance on “Kahoot”, a game-based learning platform that pits students against another, ranking their performance.

Teachers claim they have been dealing with a crisis of student engagement. They pose thoughtful questions to their students and are faced with uncomfortable silence. But too often, I think, they are misinterpreting the silence for apathy or lack of engagement, and are not identifying it for what it really is: a lack of critical thinking.

Mistakenly, we then bend over backwards to think of fun, creative ways to “engage” our students, to “speak their language”. And then it doesn’t work. We then complain to each other in the break room that “these kids don’t enjoy anything. How can I get a book to compete for their attention with TikTok?” But if I was a student who constantly had teachers jumping through hoops to make learning “fun” or “relatable”, I would become exhausted. The push would have the opposite effect, especially because it would be coming from a teacher. Especially if I didn’t know how to read. I’d want to be taught how to read.

Unfortunately, learning has been reduced to a simplified game. In a desperate attempt to make learning more accessible, students have been given the wrong idea of what education is supposed to be. But the kids don’t want it anymore. They need rigor. They want to be taught the old school way. They want to be challenged. They want to learn critical thinking skills. Teachers have to get past the fabricated fear that students will resist any semblance of a challenge. School, in some ways, has to become boring again.

“Penelope could never match your beauty. She is a human; you are deathless, ageless. But even so, I want to go back home, and every day I hope that day will come. If some god strikes me on the wine-dark sea, I will endure it…Let this come too”.

When I teach The Odyssey, what draws my students to the story isn’t the suspense of returning home, nor is it the strange and typically most popular adventures that make up Books X-XII; it usually the gods and goddesses that first capture their attention.

Because The Odyssey’s very patchwork spans hundreds of years of oral tradition and transformation, it stands as not just as a reflection of Ancient Greek religion but also an influence on how the gods were imagined. This is why the first poster for Christopher Nolan’s upcoming film adaptation of The Odyssey, which reads simply, “Defy the Gods”, has grabbed the attention of readers and scholars.

Sure, the dynamic between the gods and mortals is an easy impetus for generating conflict, and therefore, a natural point of interest for the filmmaker. And perhaps “defy the gods” is merely a marketing tactic, independent from Christopher Nolan’s plans for the film. Regardless, the gods and goddesses mattered significantly to the Greeks and were integral to how the Greeks told stories, so the question is worth exploring: what does it mean to “defy the gods” in The Odyssey, and how might that defiance be portrayed in the film?

“Defy the Gods”— A Modern Challenge to Divine Justice?

The natural observation to make upon seeing the poster is that this imperative– to “defy the gods” – challenges an understanding of divine justice that is established in any high school reading of The Odyssey: that those who defy the gods will suffer, so you shouldn’t do it. This definition of divine justice is apparent from the start, when a council of the gods on Mount Olympus discuss Odysseus’ fate, whose return home to Ithaka from the Trojan War has been delayed by Poseidon for his blinding of the sea god’s son, Polyphemus the Cyclops. Athena pleads to Zeus to have mercy on Odysseus, urging Zeus to demand Odysseus’ release from the island of the minor goddess Calypso.

Jonathan Rowlands, theology professor at St. Mellitus College, hypothesizes that the slogan “defy the gods” may suggest that Nolan’s adaptation will appeal to our “modern sensibilities [that] encourage us to be suspicious of institutionalized power, especially when that power takes a religious shape”.

He notes that this would be consistent with the messages of Nolan’s films, which are often naturalistic, suggesting that the physical, material world of atoms is all there is. Rowland warns against centering the film around this subversion, reasoning that it would challenge one of the epic’s foundational tenants and feed into our increasingly hubristic society.

Although respect for the gods is clearly a tenant of the story and the culture, I’m unsure if an adaption that honors a defiance of the gods would even be that dramatic of a twist or retelling of the epic. While The Odyssey certainly exhibits the dangers of disrespecting the gods, to center an adaptation on that particular conflict would be to miss an opportunity to portray the dynamic between the divine and the mortals in an authentic and interesting way that is still true to the story. The complexities of this ancient belief system are sometimes challenging to grasp and, therefore, have been ignored in other cinematic adaptations of Greek myth.

There is a popular belief that Nolan’s film will spin a contemporary take on the epic. This belief assumes that this move is necessary, as if the epic is too archaic, dusty, and predictable for modern audiences; as if the story is not already surprisingly modern. A refreshing retelling of The Odyssey would not require any dramatic “twist” of the novel’s themes or events at all, but rather, an exploration of the uncertainty surrounding one of the “established” values of the epic. In the introduction to his 2025 translation of The Odyssey, Daniel Mendelsohn writes

Appropriately for a poem about a man who is polytropos, ‘having many turns of mind’—the Odyssey itself often twists and toys with the apparent dichotomies it presents… A careful reading of the text thus reveals that each of the ‘poles’ that seem to define its values is less stable than we might have thought.

Despite The Odyssey’s strong theme of divine justice, it still prioritizes the mortal experience over divine will. This prioritization is made more discernible by being placed in a world where the hero often crosses the boundary between the divine and mortal realms. But before exploring the ways in which the film may faithfully yet creatively present a defiance of gods, a general understanding of the divine’s relationship to mortals in The Odyssey must be established.

The Human-like Gods and Goddesses

The Greeks’ worship of their divinities is markedly different from the familiar Old Testament tradition, which presents God as reclusive, faceless, and invisible, speaking to humans only through miracles and angels. The Greeks’ faith, on the other hand, envisions a world infused with divine presence. Holiness resides not in abstract principles but in natural environments and the gods who manifest them. As Emily Wilson writes in the introduction to her 2018 translation of The Odyssey, “Great charm and magic comes from the notion that the divine and human world are less separate than we might otherwise imagine”.

Besides their presence in the story’s action, what makes the gods so visible is their likeness to humans. The gods are emotional and even petty, revealing the same irrationality found in human characters. Wilson writes, “The gods in The Odyssey are self-interested beings, whose interventions in human lives are motivated primarily by their own desires, whims, and preferences rather than by a consistent commitment to uphold moral law”. Poseidon’s punishment of Odysseus is not for some breaking of a virtue established by the gods; rather, it is a settling of a personal score. Calypso famously calls out Zeus for a sexist double-standard when she’s denied a relationship with mortals such as Odysseus.

Furthermore, the Greeks’ view of the divine did not require the gods to be just or benevolent, even towards their most faithful followers. Wilson writes, “Some readers have assumed that the gods in this poem–or at least Zeus–are defenders of not only xenia…but also morality in general. Some leap to the further notion that the triumph of Odysseus over the suitors represents an ethical victory, sanctioned by the gods. This certainly goes too far”.

Wilson then states, “it is less clear that the gods see themselves in quite this way”. During the council, Zeus agrees to release Odysseus from Calypso’s island not because Odysseus is a paragon of morality, but rather, as the king of the gods, Zeus relates to Odysseus, King of Ithaka. Athena favors Odysseus primarily for his intelligence, relating to him for possessing the same capacity for metis.

As the mortals and gods do not demand each other to always behave morally, there exists no permanent covenant as there does in the Old Testament. This understanding could lend itself to a mortal defiance of the gods if the people have no right to expect that the gods will always be on their side, even if they carry out all the appropriate rituals of worship.

Odysseus’ Decision

When Odysseus finally appears in the story – not until Book V – he is facing a significant choice – one that defines the values of the story. After Zeus destroys Odysseus’ ship, Odysseus washes up on the shores of Calypso’s Island, where he spends the next seven years, where “the scent of citrus and of brittle pine suffused the island. Inside, she was singing… Her voice was beautiful. Around the cave a luscious forest flourished: alder, poplar, and scented cypress”. Yet, when we first find Odysseus, he is alone on the shore, “weeping and moaning and tearing his heart to shreds in despair”.

Calypso had rescued Odysseus, providing him with a “home that seems in certain very obvious ways superior to his original home on Ithaca” (Wilson). We see Calypso remind Odysseus of her physical superiority to Penelope, who waits loyally in Ithaca, keeping her suitors at bay: “I know my body is better than hers is. I am taller too. Mortals can never rival the immortals in beauty”. And although Odysseus is subservient in this relationship, it is suggested that he and Calypso enjoyed this relationship affectionately.

Calypso even presents Odysseus the opportunity of agelessness and status as an immortal. But Odysseus loves Penelope, whose love for Odysseus is more suspicious than and testing than Calypso’s. Odysseus replies to Calypso’s offer:

“Penelope could never match your beauty. She is a human; you are deathless, ageless. But even so, I want to go back home, and every day I hope that day will come. If some god strikes me on the wine-dark sea, I will endure it…Let this come too”.

In this decision, Odysseus is choosing not only Penelope but also to become old and to die. Emily Wilson writes, “Odysseus’ yearning for home is resonant and moving, because it is not clear why Odysseus makes this choice. Odysseus is masochistic: a deliberate embrace of suffering and a perverse preference for something worse over something better”.

Odysseus does not explain his reasons. Perhaps because they are implied; perhaps because they point to something that we want that is undefinable, impossible to explain to a divinity. We can relate to Odysseus’ decision because most of us would make the same one, recognizing Calypso’s offer as not, in fact, infinite in satisfaction or happiness, but instead terrifying: living forever in obscurity, free of any responsibility, beholden to another being who retains complete control.

Furthermore, there is no guarantee that Odysseus will truly “return home”. He must reestablish relationships with his wife and son, who was a newborn when he left for the war. He must step back into life at Ithaca and reclaim his kingship to deliver Ithaca from chaos. Not to mention, if he were to slay the suitors, he would be left with the problem of the suitors’ families. Odysseus could become Ithaca’s most wanted man. Calypso tells him that if he knew how much suffering was ahead of him, he would stay at her island. Everything that he wants is imperfect, changing, and requires difficult work – a stark contrast to the life of agelessness and immortality that he rejects. He wants power over the small kingdom of Ithaca; he wants the respect of his neighbors, his father, his son, and the much-desired, sought-after Penelope. He wants the respect of the people in his life, not that of the gods.

Traversing Boundaries

When in the Underworld, Odysseus tells Achilles that he should not be bitter at his death, for his death earned him power in the divine realm of the underworld. Frowning, Achilles replies, “I would prefer to be a workman, hired by a poor man on a peasant farm, than rule as king of all the dead”. Odysseus hears Achilles’ lament in the middle of his journey, directly after choosing to stay for a year at the goddess Circe’s palace. To this point, Odysseus has let himself become distracted and allured by the foreign lands and divinities that he encounters. It is no surprise that this encounter comes directly at the halfway point of the epic, before the last twelve books focus entirely on the humanity of Ithaca and its politics, customs, and relationships.

Odysseus is unique in that he threatens to break the boundaries set between mortals and the divine. His direct interactions with the divine suggest that through building oneself up, and through demonstrating will, resilience, and a commitment to survival, one can become worthy of receiving attention and good fortune from the gods and may even become on par with them in some ways. Although Athena is Odysseus’ mentor, their relationship feels like a partnership, as the two banter with each other, admiring each other’s wit. Odysseus even outsmarts Athena at times.

Odysseus seems to earn the opportunity to have these interactions through adherence to the adage, “fortune favors the bold”. The gods are drawn to him for the extremes of his human strengths; Odysseus embodies not just a clinging to human life, but an embrace of all the world has to offer. He is described in the epic’s very opening lines: “Tell me about a complicated man. Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy, and where he went, and who he met, the pain he suffered on the sea, and how he worked to save his life and bring his men back home”. Odysseus’ fearlessness gives him access to the divine, and in turn, he swaps this appetite for the exotic, the mystical, the divine, for life in Ithaca.

Disappearance of the Gods

It’s been fascinating to watch Christopher Nolan work his way through the major film genres, bringing his brand of storytelling to each: the superhero movie, the space epic, the war film, the historical biopic—and now, the ancient epic. Some might see The Odyssey as an unlikely match for him, just as many once doubted that a Batman film could suit him.

But this skepticism stems from a misunderstanding of The Odyssey —namely, the assumption that it's primarily an adventure story pitting Odysseus against the supernatural, the divine. In truth, the most famous episodes—the Cyclops, the Sirens, the Lotus-Eaters, Circe—occupy only four of the poem’s twenty-four books. The rest focus largely on Ithaca and the human life occurring there. As Emily Wilson notes, “epic” may be a misnomer: the true trial Odysseus faces— to make it home — is simple and deeply human.

“Defy the Gods” may not ultimately be the central theme of Nolan’s film. Given the density of The Odyssey, he has countless conflicts to explore and archetypes to reimagine. Nolan’s act of “defying the gods” may ultimately lie in downplaying them altogether—rendering them distant, disengaged forces, more akin to the remote and abstract God of the Old Testament. In an interview with The New York Review of Books, Daniel Mendelsohn argues that compared to The Iliad, The Odyssey is marked by divine withdrawal:

My theory is that there’s something special The Odyssey has, something that The Iliad does not have at all. I want to call it a sort of “post-ness.” It’s obviously a postwar poem, but it’s also a sort of post-everything poem. The old order has disappeared. The gods have receded. They’re almost not present at all, except in a couple of crucial moments, and certainly not in the way they’re present in The Iliad, where they’re all over the action and fighting in the battles. You feel the gods have withdrawn. Odysseus is a lone guy in a strange world with no familiar landmarks. The whole poem is haunted by a feeling that the old world order has come to an end, and now we’re just on our own, making our way as best we can. That may be what’s speaking to people.

The relative absence of divine intervention in the epic isolates Odysseus, forcing him to rely solely on his human resilience. This is where The Odyssey draws its epic charm: in the sense that no one, no god, is coming to save him. We watch him cling to his shattered raft, tossed violently in the middle of a vast sea; grasp at jagged rocks like a barnacle as waves batter him mercilessly; and descend alone into the depths of the underworld—a realm mortals were never meant to enter. We ask ourselves the question: how could he possibly make it home—a place sanctified and exalted by the gods—from here? And if he does, is he truly prepared to trade his hunger for adventure for the stillness of domestic life? Does he want to be the person that the gods have preserved him to be?