The Role Of Telemachos In Homer's Odyssey

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Would you rather be the person on the journey or be the person left waiting? It is easy to think of The Odyssey as Odysseus’ story alone. After all, it bears his name. He gets held up on his way home by an angry sea god and meets probably half the creatures mentioned in Greek mythology. To people who have never really read The Odyssey, that’s it. The end. But that’s oversimplifying things. Odysseus, the hero of the story, does not even appear until the fifth book of the story. Why? Because no matter how heroic, how larger than life Odysseus is, the epic does not belong to him alone. He shares it with his son Telemachos, a character who rightly deserves his own Telemachy. A contact zone, according to Mary Louise Pratt, is a “space and time where subjects previously separated by history and geography are now present.” It is quite easy to pinpoint the contact zones encountered by Odysseus, but Telemachos has his own as well. They are less grander than his father’s death-defying exploits, but damaging and…show more content…
A woman running an estate, especially one as large as this, is quite unthinkable. Suitors converge on their doors for Penelope’s hand, and they refuse to leave the mansion without her consent to marry someone.These suitors, though men from Ithaka and the surrounding regions, have never been part of their lives before. They can still be considered historically and geographically separate from the story’s main family. The presence of the suitors highlights three problems that Telemachos battles throughout the epic. First, the suitors have gone way beyond the lines of the host-guest relationship set by Zeus. In turn, they have violated the sanctity of Telemachos’ home and have stripped him of his voice and authority. Lastly, the suitors press him to move on and give up the twenty-year vigil for his father’s
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