Essay Week 3

The Odyssey

This week I did the reading unit in classical The Odyssey by Homer. This was an entertaining unit. The readings in this unit did give a new reader a great introduction to the epic and translation to English by Tony Kline was excellent. However, this unit was lacking in one area because, it started in the later chapters of the epic instead of the very beginning. I understand that it may not be possible to create unit from this epic that included all the chapters of the epic, but I feel it is important to allow the reader to have all the information about the characters in the book.

While in the opening introduction of the unit the beginning point of the unit is explained. There is not enough information in this introduction to do the early chapters of the Odyssey justice. I think this unit could use more than just a simple introduction, maybe this could come in the form of a separate starting chapter that works as a companion to the remainder of the rest of the chapters of the book. There are so many things that happen to the characters in the Odyssey that by writing a “Cliff Notes” version for the first few chapters would be more useful that a simple explanation in the introduction.

Another way to accomplish this is to create an expanded introduction. I understand that the Iliad unit can act as a way to give new readers more information about these characters, but the issue with that is that readers may not read the Iliad, so the Odyssey unit must stand alone. By expanding the introduction so that it leads right up to the events in the opening chapters of the unit a new reader will gain a better understanding of the story. Also, this would be a good place to introduce the reader to the Iliad which will hopefully encourage them to seek out that unit and read it also. Though the introduction to the unit does all this, I feel it does fall short and would be more interesting if was written as more of another chapter and expanded by around 300 words. In all however, this was a very entertaining unit that have some of the best parts of the Odyssey in it so that new readers would be introduced to the Odyssey in a way that was not boring and full of enough information that they would be able to understand the story.



Picture Attribution
Alexander Pope [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons