Johnson’s choice of setting, his decision to focus the narrative on a protagonist who is a black sailor aboard a slave ship in the Atlantic, and his source material are elements that make the novel a narrative that is rooted in the history of the transatlantic slave trade.

Johnson chooses to set his story on the Atlantic Ocean and in Atlantic ports in New Orleans, the Caribbean, and the western coast of Africa. The Atlantic that Johnson uses as his setting is one that acknowledges the role of the slave trade in Western history and the engagement of both slave and free people of African descent with the Atlantic. In fact, the novel represents the “Black Atlantic,” a term coined by academic Paul Gilroy. Gilroy’s central argument is that the Atlantic slave trade—the ships, the money, the people, its impact on the identities of Westerners and the African people they enslaved—is what pushed the West into modern ways of thinking about identity and the nation.

An important intervention Johnson makes in one of the myths of Western identity is his transformation of a tale about a sailor lost but on a journey home—a tale at least as old as The Odyssey, which Johnson explicitly references several times in the novel.