While structured as a classic quest narrative, The Palm-Wine Drinkard systematically subverts the conventions of the heroic epic. Traditional epic quest tropes and conventions in Western literature are recurring structural, thematic, and character patterns derived from classical foundations like Homer’s Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid. These conventions and tropes form the basis of the expectations of Western literature and literary figures, often following a familiar pattern which is known to the audience, thus allowing the audience to measure the texts’ heroes against the heroic conventions of Western culture. The Palm-Wine Drinkard consciously challenges many of these tropes in order to illustrate metaphorically the tension between the colonizing Western forces and the enduring culture of colonized (in this case, African and specifically Nigerian) subjects. 

In contrast to Western conventions, for example, the titular Drinkard is not a noble warrior or a wise leader. Instead, he is depicted as a lazy, self-absorbed person whose journey is motivated by addiction to alcohol rather than virtue. Throughout his travels, he rarely succeeds through bravery, cleverness, or inner strength, relying instead on an endless supply of magical charms inherited from his father. The novel presents a mock-heroic saga centered on an anti-hero who stumbles through a fantastical world, achieving his goals through external power rather than personal merit, thereby questioning the nature of heroism itself. As the hero of this particular tale, the Drinkard’s lack of conventional heroism is a rebuke of colonial forces which try to foist archetypes and templates onto other cultures.

The quest’s inception is deeply ignoble. The narrator, a self-described “expert palm-wine drinkard” (1), embarks on his journey only after his personal tapster dies, cutting off his supply of 225 kegs of palm-wine per day. He is not aiming to honor the dead or save a community. Instead, he is motivated purely by a desire to restore his access to alcohol. He wishes to return to idleness, rather than restore himself (or his community) to greatness. This selfish premise is established in the novel’s opening pages. Upon discovering his tapster’s corpse, the Drinkard’s first impulse has nothing to do with mourning his friend. His first act is to climb another palm-tree, tap more wine, and drink to his “satisfaction” before bothering to bury the body. Indulgence, rather than respect, is his primary concern. His subsequent isolation is a practical issue, rather than a consequence of his actions: His friends abandon him because there is no more free palm-wine. This foundation establishes a character devoid of the selflessness and high-minded purpose typical of an epic hero, but also one who lives in an equally selfish society where friendship is predicated on access to resources. 

Added to the subversion of literary conventions, the Drinkard’s successes are almost entirely unearned. He repeatedly introduces himself with the boastful, aggrandizing title “Father of gods who could do anything in this world” (27), yet he solves nearly every problem by resorting to his collection of juju. Such hubris, in traditional epic stories, would be punished yet the Drinkard repeatedly benefits from such claims. The cultural expectations surrounding such attitudes, the novel suggests, are not those of Western literature or Western society. When challenged by a god to retrieve an unspecified object from a blacksmith, he transforms into a bird to eavesdrop on the god’s conversation and learn the nature of what he must retrieve. To capture Death, he relies on a magic net given to him by the same god. He rescues his future wife from the Skulls by changing her into a kitten and himself into a sparrow to fly away, rather than by outsmarting, outfighting, or outmaneuvering the Skulls. This constant reliance on external, inherited magic suggests a protagonist who is more of a vessel for supernatural power than a wielder of personal strength or intelligence. His heroism, in this sense, is a hollow performance, lacking the internal substance of a traditional epic figure.

Unlike heroes who undergo significant moral and personal development, the Drinkard remains fundamentally unchanged by his extraordinary experiences. His journey does not impart wisdom or foster empathy. After rescuing his wife, he fathers a monstrous, violent child who terrorizes the household, and his solution is to burn the house down with the child inside. At the end of his decade-long quest, his first act upon returning home is to send for 200 kegs of palm-wine and resume his old lifestyle. The final episode with the magic egg further reinforces his recklessness; he uses it to feed the masses, but allows their carelessness to destroy it, then uses a second, malevolent power for petty revenge. Rather than become a wiser man, the Drinkard completes his journey as the same self-centered character he was at the start, making his story a parody of the transformative heroic arc. The result of this is to draw attention to the influence of colonial cultural frameworks on colonized countries. 

By explicitly diverging from literary expectations, the novel invites the reader to question why Nigerian stories and folklore should be expected to adhere to such expectations. In challenging traditional Western literary tropes, The Palm-Wine Drinkard draws attention to the way in which colonialism compels colonized subjects to adhere to Western expectations and values. The Drinkard, as an unconventional literary hero, is an implicit challenge to the expectations and standards of colonizing forces.