(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5883409&forum_id=2\u0026mark_id=4593694#50005517)

the iliad and the odyssey are the very best of what the world has to offer.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5883409&forum_id=2\u0026mark_id=4593694#50005567)

Reply: A better poem might once have existed but been lost.

180 LR.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5883409&forum_id=2\u0026mark_id=4593694#50006385)

What kind of people don't like a dude persevering against all odds for the sake of his family, only to discover that his family has held out for his return to the best of their abilities while being pressed by lowlifes of all types to abandon his memory, and absolutely fucking slaying those lowlifes down to the last man?

It even has a wonderful and loyal dog for chrissake. What's not to love??

I'll tell you who doesn't love it: purple hairs. That's who. And that's why they want to defile it

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5883409&forum_id=2\u0026mark_id=4593694#50006161)

-high IQ white man

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5883409&forum_id=2\u0026mark_id=4593694#50006470)

It’s supposedly the master blueprint for the "Hero's Journey" and contains nearly every major character archetype and plot device we still use today.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5883409&forum_id=2\u0026mark_id=4593694#50005578)

Puhlease

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5883409&forum_id=2\u0026mark_id=4593694#50006042)

I am doing a lot of catch-up reading for college and whatnot, and while I'm fairly well-versed in literature(especially Shakespearean), I'd never read a Greek epic. So, I tried out the Odyssey, since an adventure story seemed quite interesting. Now, I get that some people might enjoy the Odyssey for various reasons, and that it is considered one of the great Epics, but, after reading the entire thing, I've come to the conclusion that it is a bad book for these three reasons.

1. The Odyssey's story structure is confusing, and feels contrived. Between the bizarre transitions between viewpoints and the pointless tangents about myths that have no relation to the story, I had to constantly backtrack to figure out what was going on. To make this worse, the book has huge stretches of completely unimportant and uninteresting text, about half of which is a repetition of text that came before(sometimes word for word), and so you can't even tell what you should be paying attention to.

2. Writing should show, not tell. The Odyssey tells, but hardly ever shows. Before the suitors do ONE bad thing, the book tells you that they are horrible dozens of times, and completely unprompted. Telemachus' 'coming of age' just happens, it isn't described at all, but we are still told in no uncertain terms that Telemachus is a stronger, better person now. The only thing that shone through all this is that the gods are a bunch of dumb jerks who are as mean as they are fickle. Everything else was yelled at me so many times that I couldn't reach any conclusions of my own.

3. An Epic should have some level of universality. The Odyssey is often cited as the perfect example of the Hero's Journey, or Monomyth, and is considered a very universal story. Well, I have no idea why. Nothing about his journey, or any of the other characters, resonates with me at all. The whole thing seems to revolve around hospitality, or xenia, and not only is hospitality not very important in most other cultural contexts, the Greek conception of it differs greatly from nearly every other conception.

I know this is considered one of the greatest written works, nay, one of the greatest stories, ever. Can somebody tell me why it is considered so despite these problems? I seriously want to know, I feel like the only person on the planet who doesn't like this book.

​

Edit: I get that its really old and that standards of literature change. I get that. I'm not saying it was bad when it was written, or that it isn't important. I just don't understand why it is considered a great epic regardless of time period, and why it is upheld as the way we should be writing.

​

Edit Edit: I also get that it was originally a poem that was orally told. But SOMEBODY had to write it down, and whoever they were, they should've taken a few more liberties.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5883409&forum_id=2\u0026mark_id=4593694#50007098)

1. "The structure is confusing and repetitive." The Odyssey is a transcription of an oral performance tradition. The repetition you're complaining about — the word-for-word repeated passages, the epithets, "rosy-fingered dawn" for the 40th time — those are formulaic building blocks that let a bard compose and recite a 12,000-line poem from memory, live, over multiple nights. They also served the audience: when your listeners can't flip back a page, repetition IS the navigation system. And the "bizarre transitions between viewpoints"? You mean the in medias res structure with nested flashbacks that virtually every writer since has stolen? Odysseus narrating his own adventures at the Phaeacian court — as a possibly unreliable narrator polishing his own legend — is one of the oldest and most sophisticated framing devices in literature. You didn't find a flaw. You found the invention of the thing.

2. "Show, don't tell." You're taking a creative writing workshop maxim coined in the era of the modern realist novel and retroactively flunking a Bronze Age poem for not complying with it. That's not a standard, that's a time machine with a red pen. But even granting the premise: the poem does show. The suitors devour another man's livestock, plot to murder his son, and abuse a disguised beggar in his own home — the abuse-of-the-guest sequence is one long escalating demonstration. And Telemachus's arc absolutely is dramatized: he goes from sitting passively among the suitors daydreaming, to calling an assembly, sailing to Pylos and Sparta, holding his own with kings, and finally stringing-adjacent his father's bow and fighting beside him. If you read all of that as "it just happens," the telling isn't the problem.

3. "It's not universal because it's about xenia." This is the wildest one. A man spends ten years trying to get home to his wife while she holds off men trying to erase him and his son tries to become someone worthy of him. Homecoming, grief, loyalty, endurance, identity — "who are you, stranger?" is asked in basically every book — and your takeaway was "this is a niche poem about Greek houseguests." Xenia is the vehicle, not the theme. It's how the poem tests every single character's decency when they think no one important is watching. We have a version of that concept in literally every culture; we just don't have a cool word for it. Also, mild irony alert: you're "fairly well-versed in Shakespeare," a writer who tells constantly, repeats himself constantly, goes on mythological tangents constantly, and whom you're extending exactly the historical charity you refuse to extend to Homer.

Your edits give the game away. "Somebody had to write it down, and they should've taken more liberties" — you're mad that the transcriber of a sacred oral tradition didn't rewrite it into a novel 2,300 years before novels existed. The Odyssey isn't upheld as "the way we should be writing." It's upheld because it's the ancestor every other adventure story is descended from, and because it still works: you read the whole thing, cover to cover, and then wrote 500 words because you couldn't stop thinking about it. That's the poem winning, by the way.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5883409&forum_id=2\u0026mark_id=4593694#50007114)

On structure: You experienced the repetition as noise because you were reading silently, alone, with the ability to backtrack — three things no member of the original audience could do. This was a performance, delivered from memory over several nights to a hall of people. The repeated passages are the chorus of a song; the formulaic epithets are load-bearing beams that let a bard improvise in meter in real time. Here's the part that should genuinely change your view rather than just excuse the poem: once you know this, the repetitions stop being filler and become signal. When a messenger repeats a speech word-for-word, you're meant to notice the one place it changes. When Odysseus retells his own story, you're meant to notice what he embellishes and omits depending on his audience — because he's a liar, and the poem knows he's a liar, and it's inviting you to catch him. You complained you "couldn't tell what to pay attention to." That's what. The variations in the repetition ARE the book.

On show-don't-tell: You're applying a workshop rule from the age of the realist novel to a Bronze Age oral poem, which is anachronistic — but forget that defense, because you don't need it. The poem shows plenty; you just filed the showing under "telling" because a narrator was also talking. The suitors don't just get called wicked — you watch them consume another man's estate, plot the murder of his teenage son, and throw a footstool at a beggar who is, unbeknownst to them, the king whose bread they're eating. That last one is the whole moral machinery of the poem operating in a single scene: in this world, how you treat a stranger who can do nothing for you is the entire measurement of your soul, precisely because any stranger might be a god, or a king, in disguise. Which brings me to —

Universality, where you've got it exactly backwards. You read "the whole thing revolves around xenia" and concluded it's culturally niche. My friend. A poem about how the powerful treat the powerless when they think nobody important is watching is not a niche Greek concern — it's every parable, every mystery-guest folk tale, every "how you treat the waiter is who you are" in existence. And it's the delivery mechanism for themes you somehow declared un-relatable: a veteran who takes ten years to actually come home from a war and isn't the same man who left. A wife defending her household alone against men who insist her husband is dead. A kid who grew up fatherless trying to figure out how to be a man from rumors and strangers. If none of that resonates with you, the issue isn't that the poem is too Greek. And the evidence is your own behavior: you finished all 12,000 lines of a book you hated, then wrote a structured three-point essay begging strangers to explain it to you. People do not do that for bad books. They do that for books that got under their skin before their vocabulary caught up.

Last thing, on your edit: the transcriber "should've taken more liberties" is the one place I'd genuinely push back hardest, because the liberties are the tragedy of every other epic. We KNOW what happens when later writers "fix" oral tradition — you get tidy, dead texts. The Odyssey survived precisely because someone froze the living performance mid-breath, weird seams and all. You're not holding a badly edited novel. You're holding the fossil of a voice. Read Book 23 again — the bed test, where Penelope out-cons the greatest liar in Greek literature to verify her own husband — and tell me the person who wrote your favorite Shakespeare scenes didn't learn it from here.

You said you feel like the only person on the planet who doesn't like this book. Nah. You're one of thousands of people who read it wrong the first time, which is a club that includes basically everyone who was assigned it at your age. The difference is most of them never picked it up again. Δ's on the table if you do.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5883409&forum_id=2\u0026mark_id=4593694#50007140)

Two gripes, and they're nitpicks mostly. First, they give Odysseus a monologue at the end — which I assume will generate a lot of discourse once more people see it — where he tells Penelope (who at this point believes he's a beggar who fought alongside Odysseus in the war) that the reason it took him so long to get home is that the Trojan horse strategy was "dishonorable" and "violated Zeus's code." No joke, the message of the film is partially that the Trojan horse was a war crime and the gods are punishing Odysseus for his lack of honor. And it's like, I don't know man — seems like everyone involved was making the best decisions they could at the time! Second, Nolan just kind of sucks at capturing human emotion as a filmmaker. He loves to do dialogue over silent flashback montages while Ludwig or Hans Zimmer play "BWAHHHHHH" music.

As for the culture war stuff: people will turn everything into a battleground. What's actually happening is the movie has a diverse cast, so conservatives want to destroy it sight unseen, painting it as far worse than it is — the character everyone was freaking out about dies in the first sixty seconds of the movie lmao, and most of these characters have about two minutes of screentime anyway. An underrated motivator here: the Academy now requires diversity benchmarks to qualify for Best Picture, and this will 100% win Best Picture this year if it qualifies. I think it's probably that simple.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5883409&forum_id=2\u0026mark_id=4593694#50007101)

http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5883180&forum_id=2#50007060

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5883409&forum_id=2\u0026mark_id=4593694#50007972)