Homer’s The Odyssey

Writing in the eighth or ninth century B.C.

Recapping events that occurred several hundred years earlier

His works drawn from long collections of oral stories, passed down and collected

Assumed he was blind, though his work is full of realistic visual description

The Epic

  • A long narrative poem on a great and serious subject
  • Centers on a heroic figure on whose actions depend the fate of a tribe, a nation, or the human race
  • Setting is often world wide or larger
  • Action often involves superhuman deeds in battles
  • Gods and other supernatural beings take an interest or active part
  • Uses commonly adopted conventions in the structure and style

Such as recurrent themes, language, behaviors

  • Often framed in terms of a quest

Homer’s style

  • Great artist in terms of style and plot construction
  • Great knowledge of and portrayal of human personality and behavior
  • Characters are living human beings portrayed with the limitations and contradictions of real people
  • Very realistic, concrete depiction of character and action
  • Uses typical elements of oral epic: use of epithets (recurrent phrases to characterize animate or inanimate objects) and retardation (interrupts the plot, sidetracks to give further background information) recurrent behaviors (disguise)
  • Psychological conflict externalized in the adventures of the hero – Scylla and Charybdis, Calypso, the Cyclops
  • Revered for unifying a series of traditional stories and myths

Odysseus is an atypical hero

  • Cunning, always suspicious
  • Emotion
  • Quest is not some great ideal, but to get home to his wife, son
  • Still very brave, strong, responsible
  • Climax at home, not in the battlefield, fighting for his house, not his country/religion

Structure of the Odyssey

  • 24 books – 6 divisions
  • could also be seen as 3 major divisions: Telemachus/Odysseus’s journey/Odysseus back in Ithaca
  • alternating reception and wandering
  • heading home (with retardations)
  • imbalance to balance
  • parallel lives

Women - Varied

  • sexual- Helen, Calypso
  • powerful – Athena (though often disguised as a man)
  • dangerous – Calypso
  • partner in marriage – Penelope (Nausicaa will be)
  • Scylla and Charybdis (both bad choices)
  • Various nymphs (some not to be trusted, some helpful)

Gods/Religion

  • Provide no purposeful, long-range guidance
  • Protect their own when called upon – Poseidon, Athena
  • Easily offended – punish when not given due respect
  • Destiny and free will
  • Human-like

The Underworld

  • Contains the spirits of real men
  • Nothing to look forward to
  • Shadows/shades
  • Little differentiation between good and evil

Themes

  • Importance of stable home, marriage, family
  • Importance of hospitality and ritual as a measure of social cohesion
  • Haphazard quality of human existence
  • Search for truth – the quest: (Telemachus)
  • Discovery and Rediscovery of self – disguise/naming/identifying/explaining – characters do not change, just reveal more of themselves
  • Suffering: the process by which man learns about his own strength
  • Pain is often a necessary precondition of achievement
  • Perseverance – a key human quality
  • Heroic affirmation of life itself – despite suffering
  • Opposition between culture and anti-culture

Recurrent Motifs

  • Disguise
  • Recognition – the dog, the nurse/the scar, Telemachus, Penelope
  • Tests – the bow and arrow, the bed, athletic contests
  • Story-telling
  • Guest/host
  • Irony
  • Intervention of the gods/prophecies
  • Pairs/opposites
  • Identity vs. lack of identity
  • Loyalty of the weak
  • Power and powerlessness