I think you could perhaps get that someone may have helped him and looked after him in a way that he didn't need to be very independent, George is always helping him and telling him things they don't have.. This could be down to his mental health but also down to his childhood. Just what I got from it..hope it helped a little :)
The speaker is a black slave
Odysseus is a hero because Odysseus was the man that saved the Greeks in the Trojan War and helped them.
B would make the prose more difficult to read and thus interrupt the natural rhythm
