Comparing Ulysses Everett And Odysseus In Homer's The Odyssey

In the story of the Odyssey, the main character Odysseus and his crew of sailors are on the way back to Ithaca from the Trojan war. They face many conflicts that are unmistakably troublesome and only Odysseus is the survivour of this trip. In the movie Oh, Brother Where Art Thou, Ulysses, Delmar, and Pete have just escaped from prison. They are on a trip to get home, and though the trip is long and rough, they in the end succeed. The characters Ulysses Everett from “Oh, Brother Where Art Thou?” and Odysseus from Homer’s “The Odyssey” are comparable because they both go through large lengths to get back to their wives and children. The journey home for Everett from OBWAT and Odysseus from the Odyssey was going to be unmistakably troubling.

For example, the main antagonist in OBWAT was the warden from the prison he escaped from. Tommy Johnson, a guitarist who souled his soul to the devil, describes the devil, saying “He’s white, as white as you folks, with empty eyes and a big hollow voice. He likes to travel around with a mean old hound.” In his description he describes the warden from the movie, insinuating that the warden is the devil. The warden follows in search of the escaped convicts planning to hang them. In the Odyssey, the god Poseidon is the main force against Odysseus. As an example, “But all the gods pitied him except Poseidon; he remained relentlessly angry with the god like Odysseus, until his return to his own country.” Poseidon throughout the Odyssey despises Odysseus. Plainly we can see how similar the conflicts

In OBWAT, Delmar and Everett face Big Dan Teague, a large man with one eye. Big Dan tells the two that he invited them out of the restaurant they were eating in to show them an advanced tutorial, "It's all about the money! That's it gol durned money!" He then proceeds to hit them both over the head with a large branch. He exclaims that life is all about money, which we know that you need money to survive. Likewise in the Odyssey, Odysseus must take on the cyclops Polyphemos. In the end Odysseus tricks and defeats the cyclops, but Polyphemus in turn prays to his father. "If I am truly your son, and your acknowledge yourself as my father, grant that Odysseus, sacker of cities, son of Laertes, who makes his home in Ithaca, may never reach that home; but if its is decided that he shall see his own people, and come home to his strong founded house and to his own country, let him come late, in bad case, with the loss of his companions, in someone else's ship, and find troubles in his household." Polyphemos invoked his father to aid him in cursing Odysseus. In both of these examples we see the execution of how dependent their lives were on other things. Loud and clearly we see that these characters are closer in