Explanation:
The Odyssey tells the story of a heroic but far from perfect protagonist who battles many antagonists, including his own inability to heed the gods’ warnings, on his arduous journey home from war. Along the way the poem explores ideas about fate, retribution, and the forces of civilization versus savagery. While The Odyssey is not told chronologically or from a single perspective, the poem is organized around a single goal: Odysseus’s return to his homeland of Ithaca, where he will defeat the rude suitors camped in his palace and reunite with his loyal wife, Penelope. Odysseus is motivated chiefly by his nostos, or desire for homecoming, a notion in heroic culture that encouraged bravery in war by reminding warriors of the people and institutions they were fighting for back home. Odysseus’s return represents the transition from life as a warrior on the battlefield back to life as a husband, father, and head of a household. Therefore, Odysseus is ultimately motivated by a desire to reclaim these elements of his identity and once again become the person he was before he left for the Trojan War so many years earlier.
The chief conflict in the poem is between Odysseus’s desire to reach home and the forces that keep him from his goal, a conflict that the narrator of the Odyssey spells out in the opening lines. This introductory section, called a proem, appeals to the Muse to inspire the story to follow. Here, the narrator names the subject of the poem—Odysseus—and his objective throughout the poem: “to save his life and bring his comrades home.” The narrator identifies the causes of Odysseus’s struggle to return home, naming both the sun god, Helios, and Odysseus’s fellow sailors themselves as responsible: “The recklessness of their own ways destroyed them all, the blind fools, they devoured the cattle of the sun and the sun god blotted out the day of their return.” The narrator next identifies Poseidon as one of Odysseus’s main antagonists, as all the gods took pity on Odysseus except Poseidon, who “raged on, seething against the great Odysseus until he reached his native land.” Finally, the proem tells us that the Odyssey will be the story of Odysseus’s successful journey home: “the exile must return!”
