ODYSSEY Quiz #3

Answer the following question in depth, supporting your answers with references to the text. Please type and double-space your response and bring it to the next class meeting. You will answer the remaining four questions on your sheet:

"In many ways one of the most moving moments in the poem for me is when Odysseus strings his bow at the end of the 21st book. The simile for stringing the bow describes the hero as 'an expert singer skilled at lyre and song' who tunes his harp to a new pitch. That means the bow, the killing instrument, is really a musical instrument at the same time. Story-telling at that point becomes action.

"It's as though Homer were taking his whole narrative art and conferring it upon his hero and saying, all right, take your bow and treat it as a lyre and play a new song. With that lyre-bow Odysseus recomposes his kingdom; he rids it of discordant elements--the suitors--and establishes a new era of harmony. The storytelling image and the whole activity of heroism come together and are one and the same."
--Robert Fagles, ODYSSEY translator

Consider Fagles' thoughts above. Again, the importance of the art of storytelling is being highlighted within the text itself (think of the walls of Uruk telling a story in GILGAMESH, or in a moder sense, think of the way Ferris Bueller in "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" always look at the camera, telling the audience, in essence, that he is the storyteller here). Comment on this technique by the storyteller. What does it do for the story.