Odysseus Flaws

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Every story has a hero, whose journey to find something, whether that is victory over evil, success, or self-fufillment. But what each hero must also have in common is flaws that humanize them and make them relatable to the moral middle ground of real people. The most beloved stories are one is which perspective is the only thing separating the hero and villian. Odysseus is an example of a hero who closely straddles the line between good and evil, with his violence, arrogance, and infidelity in direct conflict with his wit, bravery, and determination. The power of a story is shown in The Odyssey, as Odysseus is kept immortally alive as a protagonist who is cheered on by the readers. The development of Odysseus as a hero takes place through …show more content…

The story of the cyclops could be told very easily told from the perspective of Odysseus as the arrogant theif, and the cyclops defending its home from those who, “set our hands on the cheeses, offered some to the gods and ate the bulk ourselves” (218). Odysseus’s demands for hospitality become in a sense hypocritical, as he slaughters suitors who’d taken advantage of his home without permission, yet attacks a cyclops that does the same. Odysseus’s rage towards the maids having sex with the suitors lead him to demand his men to, “slash out all their lives- blot out of their minds the joys of love they relished under the suitors’ bodies” (453). He is never criticized for his actions, his son even spurring on the murders and punishing the women for what was alluded to as rape in the epic. On the contrary, in a novel like The Penepoliad, the maids are innocent and Odysseus becomes the cruel brute. Odysseus flaws give him a moral depth, he is no longer the untouchable warrior, but a soldier suffering from the trauma of his fighting and his own character flaws. He becomes someone to understand, and can take on a human perspective apart from just the

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