It’s clear that we as humans have been honing our narrative capabilities for much longer, and stories were not historically trapped in a linear progression. But this weaving narrative of past and present told through various stories and characters shows how wrong I was. I somewhat naively, I suppose, assumed that more complex narrative structures evolved over time. Once he returns home, he reunites with Telemachus, and the story continues.
Then Odysseus enters the story right at the end of his journey, and he retells everything that has happened to him at a banquet on Scheria before being given a ship home. Telemachus sails to neighboring islands and hears some reflections on Troy and Odysseus from Odysseus’s friends. The gods tell him that his father is coming home, and he should set out to learn about his father from his comrades at Troy since Telemachus was a baby when Odysseus left. The story starts in the present day with Telemachus dealing with all the suitors trying to woo his mother, Odysseus’s wife, Penelope. The first thing that stood out to me was the narrative complexity. Everything that happens during the 20 years he is gone, you only hear via stories told by the characters within the poem. Like The Iliad, Homer centers the story on one very brief time period, the days around Odysseus’s return.
The Odyssey on the other hand tells a great story of Odysseus’s return to his home in Ithaca. It felt like a somewhat pieced-together story, with large chunks that weren’t so relevant to the main arc of Achilles’s Wrath. If you remember from my Iliad review, that was my main complaint about it. It is much more of a story and has a more fun narrative than you get from The Iliad. I see why they typically have students read it instead of The Iliad in school. Continuing my great books project, last week I finished The Odyssey by Homer.
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