Odysseus In Homer's Odyssey

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Stephen Sondheim once wrote, “People make mistakes, thinking they’re alone.” Homer’s epic poem, The Odyssey, illustrates this as the main character takes on a long, difficult journey in his attempt to travel back home. In The Odyssey, Homer uses the actions of Odysseus and the gods to show that man depends on the gods more than he realizes, demonstrating that having faith in others is just as important as relying on one’s own actions. Throughout The Odyssey, Odysseus believes he is alone. This leads to some poor decisions on his part as he attempts to shoulder more responsibility than he can bear. He speaks many times of how Zeus dislikes him, such as; “I would go through hardships; now this all is being accomplished, such clouds these, with…show more content…
303-305). This shows how Odysseus believes that Zeus is against him, despite the fact that Poseidon is actually the one that sent the storm. This belief is why Odysseus often works so hard on his own: he thinks that even the king of the gods is trying to stop his voyage. However, Zeus, in fact, wants to help Odysseus, and states: “But come, let all of us who are here work out his homecoming / and see to it that he returns” (1. 76-77). This quote illustrates how Zeus genuinely wants to help Odysseus return home. Unfortunately, Odysseus is completely unaware of Zeus’s actions, and therefore distrusts Zeus and most of the other gods. This distrust carries over even to Odysseus’s crew. When Aiolos gives him the bag of wind, Odysseus does not tell his crew what it contains and sails on for nine days straight before he finally falls asleep from…show more content…
There are multiple occasions when the gods help Odysseus indirectly, such as when “his skin would have been taken off, his bones crushed together, had not the gray-eyed goddess Athene sent him an inkling” (5. 425-426). Another event is when she tells Princess Nausicaa to go wash her clothes in the river where Athene knows the princess will run into Odysseus and help him (6). Unfortunately, these events contribute to Odysseus’s belief that he is alone: he is unaware of many times when he would have died without the intervention of the gods, and therefore believes instead that he has achieved these things on his own. This often leads him to act pompously, such as when he encounters Polyphemos and proclaims his name, giving the Cyclops a target for Poseidon that ultimately results in more destruction and trouble for Odysseus and his crew. However, in the end, Odysseus is made to realize that he would have died had Athene not come to earth and declared: “‘Hold back, men of Ithaka, from the wearisome fighting’” (24. 529-531), stopping the inevitable fight between Odysseus and the suitors’ families. With the appearance of Athene in her true form, Odysseus is finally forced to recognize that he is not as alone as he believes, and that she, as well as many of the other gods, has been trying to help him throughout his entire journey. Overall, in The
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