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Showing posts from February, 2019

A New Perspective

In class, we just watched the movie “O’ Brother, Where Art Thou?” and compared it with how Homer’s  The Odyssey  story progresses. I saw the movie about two years ago for the first time before ever really knowing the story of  The Odyssey , so it was really interesting to see it now and be able to have a new perspective after having read  The  Odyssey . I remember when I watched it for the first time, I made the connection between the sirens in the movie and what I knew about the sirens in the real story. My dad also pointed out to me the connection between Big Dan in the movie and the Cyclops from  The Odyssey . Those were pretty much the only similarities I was able to detect before understanding the full plot of the epic poem by Homer. Watching the movie after having read the poem, however, gives it a whole new fun perspective! I never knew that Odysseus was coming home to face a bunch of suitors, and that that was a large part of the plot of the actual  Odyssey.  So now, seein

Why Eurylochus Was Right

            As a class we’ve discussed the trend throughout  The Odyssey  so far that shows Odysseus as an unreliable character. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to us as the very first line states that Odysseus is “a complicated man” (1. 1). The storyteller intentionally makes it very clear to us that Odysseus will not always do the right thing, but despite that he’s still the hero of the story. We’ve also discussed that in books 5-12 (the wanderings), Odysseus is narrating much of the story to us. Since he is the only witness to his stories, he could be embellishing or twisting the truth to make himself more of a hero.             One of the characters that comes off poorly in his story is Eurylochus. Eurylochus is first described as causing destruction to the journey by requesting that the men stay at the island of the sun god because they’re tired. Odysseus describes that after Eurylochus’ speech “I saw a spirit must be plotting our destruction” (12. 297). Odysseus describing h