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Perseverance And Revenge In Homer's The Odyssey

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Homer’s epic, The Odyssey has had a profound impact on all types of art that incorporates a hero. The archetype of a hero is followed to a ‘t’ and sets the stage for following works that include a main hero’s quest. Odysseus’ trials, tribulations, adversity, vengeance, and final victory outline the common tale of the hero’s journey throughout a plotline to an eventual victory over evil. This rough outline can be whittled down into two main themes of perseverance and vengeance. Homer’s two principal themes of a hero’s journey has come to influence many preceding works of art; specifically, In the Coen Brothers’ film O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2002), Everett Ulysses McGill (George Clooney) follows this outline of persevering the trials and taking …show more content…

The theme of perseverance is one that stretches across the wide spectrum of genres when it comes to literature and film. Romance, horror, adventure, even cartoons/graphic novels all contain the element of heroic perseverance over blockades restricting the tale’s equilibrium. In The Odyssey we see Odysseus must overcome a tremendous amount of trials to make it home to his wife and son. The quantity of trials that Odysseus must face would be far too much for a normal man, but not heroic Odysseus. He battles and outsmarts a host of fiends including Polyphemus, the sirens, Scylla and Charybdis (twice), and even the underworld itself. He needs to escape the captivity of Calypso to make it home to his family. He must reassure his men to keep their morals high and get them to press on with him. Homer details this theme with Odysseus preparing his men for yet another trial, “Friends, we’re hardly strangers at meeting danger- and this danger is no worse than what we faced when cyclopes penned us up in his vaulted cave with

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