Odysseus Descriptive Language

516 Words3 Pages
“When Dawn spread out her fingertips of rose…”(IX.163) starts each new day of Odysseus’s adventures back home to Ithaca. With every sunrise, the hero of Homer’s epic The Odyssey faces great perils and challenges that prohibit him from returning to his loving wife and son. In Book IX, Homer begins to tell the tale of Odysseus’s encounter with the Cyclops, Polyphemus. The author’s use of Odysseus’s first person perspective to narrate and of vivid descriptive language creates a mood of suspense that foreshadows this meeting. Homer uses first person to show Odysseus’s own predictions about the inhabitants of a mysterious island discovered in their travels. Before Odysseus and his crew embark on their exploration of this isle, Odysseus informs the reader that “In my bones I knew some towering brute/ would be…show more content…
He describes the supposed inhabitant of the cavern they discover “A prodigious man/ slept in this cave alone.../remote from all companions, / knowing none but savage ways, a brute/… he seemed rather a shaggy mountain reared in solitude”(IX.201-207). The words in the passage such as remote, savage, solitude, etc. create a suspenseful mood in that they start to insinuate that some sort of danger will begin to ensue. In this case, Homer uses this language to demonstrate the mysterious nature of the Cyclops. Since their lonely, barbaric behavior seems foreign to the civilized behavior of the typical Greek, it makes the Cyclopes seem much more of a threat. The unknown often is the most terrifying instance to encounter; therefore, this unknown creates a mood of uncertainty in that only the reader knows what to expect out of the Cyclops, while Odysseus and his crew do not. This also creates a conflict between reader and character as the differences in knowledge furthers this level of
Show More
Related

  • Irony In Homer's The Odyssey

    432 Words  | 2 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

    Read More

More about Odysseus Descriptive Language

Open Document