Memory theme in The Odyssey
JOURNAL INSTRUCTION
Please choose one main theme for this journal: memory, storytelling, or death.
Then, please choose a line or two on one of these themes, and use it to discuss something interesting about how that theme works in The Odyssey. Some questions that may help you are:
What is memory, storytelling, or death, in The Odyssey?
What does your line tell us about how memory, storytelling, or death work in The Odyssey?
How do memory, storytelling, or ideas about death inform how people make choices in The Odyssey?
In some cases (for example, when the dead are remembering and telling their stories in Book 11), these themes will overlap. In these cases, focus your attention on only one theme, but you may use the others to illustrate how your chosen theme works (for example, if you theme is memory, you might discuss how the dead become reduced down to a combination of how they remember life, and how living people remember them).
Tuesday, February 14, 2017
The capability of keeping something to memory is something so unique in its existence that humans have found this capability to be a big dynamic state of the world. In Odyssey the writer uses the memory of events and a people to tell a story about the people something that enhances the historical soundness of the stories and the people they relate.
There are many instances of such rich memories. For example, in book 7, the capability of Arete the queen in the years past is related as a memory, but in the same line we are introduced to the memory that serves to contrast that capability. The same lineage on which Arete hails had in the past produced people like Nausithous who were responsible for the destruction of his people and himself as well.
Again, the memories of the journey of Odyssey when he sails over the sea in book 7 brings the story at this point to a real journey of hope and optimism that the reader had been yearning to find in the experience of the main character in the narrative.
Those memories of the past greatly impact on the kind of treatment that Odyssey receives from Alcinous. The trust that the reader would have wanted to see is certainly destroyed and the future relation in books 10 and 11 reveal that the trust that makes Alcinous call ‘the stranger’ a ‘so goodly man’ previously wanes.
