Odysseus Dynamic Character

The Character Analysis Essay “Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell me the story of that man skilled in all ways contending, the wanderer, harried for years in end, after he plundered the stronghold on the proud height of Troy” (Lines 1-5). If the story needed to be narrated in one sentence, this quote would be an adequate summary. This epic derived from bards and poets around 700 B.C., it is unclear who actually wrote “The Odyssey”, but ultimately a Greek poet called Homer is the distinguished author. This popular and celebrated story, features the development and growth of the complex character, Odysseus, during his homecoming. Moreover, the concept of Odysseus being “real; that he could walk right off the page into life”, is prevalent through

Odysseus represents mankind as a round dynamic character with strengths and flaws which he repeatedly demonstrates through ingeniousness, and physical strength, but is weakened with evasiveness and arrogance. Odysseus displays, ingenuity, a strength which people from all walks of life can exhibit. The scene of ingenuity is staged after the cyclops, Polyphemus, devours two of his men, and then captures Odysseus and the rest of his men. During his struggle with Polyphemus, he carefully strategizes an escape. He first displays ingenuity when he is given the chance to kill Polyphemus, but tactically declines, “…I went along his flank to stab him where the midriff holds the liver. I had touched the spot when sudden fear stayed me: if I killed him we perished there as well, for we could never move his ponderous doorway slab aside” (201-206). Even in the midst of fear, when two of his men were

This is apparent in the event of a storm with Odysseus’s deadly opponents, Charybdis, Scylla, and Zeus. At the climax of this battle, Odysseus’s ship is swept under the whirlpool, but he manages to save himself by grabbing??hanging on a fig tree branch, “…and I sprang for the great fig tree, catching on like a bat under a bough…But I clung grimly, thinking my mast and kneel would come back to the surface when she spouted. And ah! how long, which what desire, I waited! till, at the twilight hour when one who hears and judges pleas in the marketplace all day between contentious men, goes home to supper, the long poles at last reared from the sea” (355-356…361-367). Odysseus perseveres through this grueling struggle, by using his physical strength, and endurance,;? eventually he is relieved, when the ship arises from Charybdis’s inimical/adverse whirlpool. “While he had arrows he aimed and shot, and every shot brought down one of his huddling enemies…In blood an dust he saw that crowd all fallen, many and many slain”