Irony In Homer's The Odyssey

432 Words2 Pages
From Homer telling the story of Odysseus, and it being passed down through oral tradition, to the infamous bard’s tales in the epic, storytelling has been widely used throughout The Odyssey. In a time where there was no written language, the only way to communicate was through storytelling. Using only his own memory, Homer created a descriptive poem, and he passed it down to the rest of the world through oral tradition. It was his job, and an art. The purpose of storytelling is to convey messages to other people, and he found many uses of it in this epic poem. In (8:50) of the Odyssey, the bard Demodocus appears. Exactly like Homer, Demodocus was a blind, but gifted, storyteller. (Being blind also proves that written language wasn’t important then.) King Alcinous requests that Demodocus sing. In (8:90), Demodocus begins to sing about the clash between Odysseus and Achilles in the Trojan war, and because storytelling is so powerful, Odysseus hides his face and begins to cry. Through Odysseus’ emotional moment, he is proven to be only a man, and not a god as suggested at times during the story.…show more content…
He achieves this lying, and telling stories. Through storytelling, he always seems to get out of tricky situations. Prime examples for this (8:320) when Odysseus tells Polyphemus that Zeus caused a great storm, and their ship crashed among the rocks near the shore, when in reality their ship was peacefully moored nearby. Another major fib Odysseus tells is that he is from Ithaca, which he repeats on four different occasions: to Athena (13:250), to Eumaeus in his hut (14:200-300), to the suitors in the palace (17:420-444), and to Laertes in his garden

More about Irony In Homer's The Odyssey

Open Document