“The Unknown Odysseus” by Thomas Van Nortwick: Hero has multiple personae and autobiographies, namelessness, and is self-contradictory, lying trickster.

I have never read Homer’s Odyssey, but think I should, and so have just read The Unknown Odysseus to prepare myself.

Classics Professor Van Nortwick urges “an opennesss to the implications of Odysseus’ alternate personae for our understanding of the account of human experience the poem creates.

“To put it another way, the unmaking of Odysseus in his various nonheroic personae is also the making of a wider world. Most studies of the Odyssey have assumed that the heroic Odysseus is always the real Odysseus, that the world this hero, with Athena’s help, creates in Ithaka is the only reality the poem recognizes. To read the Odyssey in this way is to put on Athena’s blinders, to identify the poem with the fairy tale. To do so robs the story of its depth and complexity, its portrayal of human experience in all its untidy profundity” (1, p. x).

“Odysseus withholds his identity until he chooses to reveal it…In this sense, the entire poem is about who Odysseus is at any given point” (1, p. 24).

“Ought we trust Odysseus as a narrator? His record in the area of truth telling is not impressive elsewhere when he delivers false autobiographies to Athena, Eumaeus, and Penelope” (1, p. 26).

“Disguises and lying, manipulation of loved ones, none of this worries us if we have given ourselves over to the story” (1, p. 31). Search “lying” in this blog.

“Now comes the famous and troubling exchange between Odysseus and his father in which the son, rather than greeting his father immediately, tortures him further with another false tale…Withholding his name has been an important strategy for the hero in the midst of strangers, but here it seems gratuitous…this torture is not necessary by any sane measure” (1, pp. 32-33).

“The central question of the narrative arises once again: who is the real Odysseus?” (1, p. 36).

“Odysseus is the master of namelessness” (1, p. 45). Search “namelessness” in this blog.

“…his contradictory character” (1, p. 50). Search “puzzling contradiction” in this blog.

“…Odysseus’ other selves…” (1, p. 77).

“…the personae Odysseus creates…” (1, p. 80).

“That Odysseus often behaves like a trickster is not news. The more important question is whether the archetype’s appearance in the story adds anything to the articulation of the poem’s reflections on human identity” (1, p. 90).

The Trickster literary archetype (2, 3) (also search “trickster” in this blog) would include “confidence man” (search) and shapeshifting (search; 4), which I would consider clues and metaphors for multiple personality.

“The Odyssey begins with the question: where is Odysseus? As the story unfolds, a second, more difficult quandary surfaces: who is Odysseus? (1, p. 98).

1. Thomas Van Nortwick. The Unknown Odysseus: Alternate Worlds in Homer’s Odyssey. Ann Arbor, The University of Michigan Press, 2009.

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickster

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fictional_tricksters

4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shapeshifting