Please access Professor Robin Mitchell-Boyask's Odyssey Study Guide (click on his name). He has written this for students who are reading the entire text - sometimes he asks questions instead of giving answers. But you should be able to follow along after you have read the synopsis in your text. Particularly useful is the chronology he provides.

You are required to read Books 9-12 of the Odyssey (this link goes to MIT).

my notes for you:

Odysseus' outstanding qualities: intelligence, greed, curiosity, pride, survival instinct.

Trials of the voyage - not just physical obstacles...also temptations.

            Lotus-eaters    offers forgetfulness
                                      disconnect from reality: squalor

            Cyclops:           our focus of interest
                                      offers perverse hospitality: anthropophagy (also
                                      compare Laestrygonians)

            Kirke                life of ease and indulgence
                                      reality: a fantasy, at the expense of his men

            Underworld      another focus of interest for us

            Sirens               tempt him to live in the past
                                      reality: offers death

           Wandering Rocks

           Scylla and Charybdis

           the island of Thrinakia, and the immortal cattle of Helios

           Kalypso            offers immortality
                                     reality: he languishes

Odysseus chooses the human condition - struggle, disappointment, death

Death is also tempting, a way to escape from current problems, but he visits the underworld and abandons thought of death as repose. Achilles; "Better to be a slave than ruler of the dead." Life! Embrace life!

End of Odysseus' voyage: he finds faithful son and wife, a son worthy of him, knowledge of a gentle death. He punishes the suitors with death.

The Homeric gods express the disorder of the world they live in (Judeo-Christian concept of God emphasizes those aspects of the universe which imply a harmonious order. Man is to blame for disorder).

copyright 2001 Janice Siegel, All Rights Reserved
send comments to: Janice Siegel (jfsiege@ilstu.edu)

date this page was edited last: 08/02/2005
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