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The Odyssey - Summary of Book 1
- The first book informs the reader of the imprisonment of Odysseus
on Calypso's island, Ogygia, in the tenth year after the Trojan War.
- It also describes the insolence of the young nobles in Ithaca (led
by Antinous and Eurymachus) who, in the absence of Odysseus,
live off his wealth and abuse the laws of xenia, whilst trying to
court his wife, Penelope.
- After the invocation to the Muses, with which the Odyssey
opens, a council of the gods is summoned, during which Zeus
decides that Odysseus shall return home safely and Athena
shows herself to be the champion of Odysseus.
- The goddess visits Telemachus, son of Odysseus, in disguise, gives him courage to
rebuke the suitors, and persuades him to seek news of his father by sailing to the
mainland. The suitors retire to their homes and Telemachus goes to bed.
- The Odyssey is an epic journey, but the word
journey must be broadly understood. The epic
focuses, of course, on Odysseus’s nostos (“return
home” or “homeward voyage”), a journey whose
details a Greek audience would already know
because of their rich oral mythic tradition.
- After the opening passages, which explain
Odysseus’s situation, the focus shifts to the
predicament of Odysseus’s son, Telemachus. He
finds himself coming of age in a household usurped
by his mother’s suitors, and it is he who, with the
support of Athena and the other gods, must step into
the role of household master that his father left vacant
nearly twenty years earlier.
- Thus, in addition to a physical journey to Pylos and Sparta to learn
more about his father’s fate, Telemachus embarks upon a
metaphorical journey into manhood to preserve his father’s estate.
- The Odyssey begins in medias res,
or in the middle of things. Rather than
open the story with the culmination of
the Trojan War, Homer begins
midway through Odysseus’s
wanderings.
- This presentation of events out of chronological sequence achieves several different goals: it
immediately engages the interest of an audience already familiar with the details of
Odysseus’s journey; it provides narrative space for a long and evocative flashback later in the
text (Books 9–12), in which Odysseus recounts his earlier travels; and it gives the story a
satisfying unity when it ends where it began, at the house of Odysseus, in Book 24.
- Most important, the in medias res opening infuses the foreground of the
story with a sense of urgency. Were the narrative to begin with the happy
victory over Troy and the beginning of Odysseus’s trip back to Greece (a
journey the Greeks would have expected to be brief at the time), the story
would start at a high point and gradually descend as Odysseus’s
misfortunes increased.
- By commencing with a brief synopsis of Odysseus’s whereabouts
and then focusing on Telemachus’s swift maturation, the narrator
highlights the tension between Telemachus and the opportunistic
suitors as it reaches a climax. Spurred on by the gods, Telemachus
must confront the suitors to honor his father.
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