Week 3 Essay Assessment: The Odyssey

Assessment:  The Odyssey

  For this week's essay option, I decided to look back at my reading of The Odyssey and make an assessment for this unit.  I thought this was a well rounded and easy to read unit compared to most of the other units that I have gone through so far.  The majority of sections in  The Odyssey unit were very good and flowed together very nicely, compared to its Iliad counterpart which felt very disconnected.  However, I did find a couple of sections in the Odyssey unit unnecessary and should be replaced with others.  My main qualm was with the sections involving the ghosts.  While they are definitely an important part of the epic that Homer gives us, I felt like they could have been put as just as an introduction summary for another section.  We are given a long section over a fairly unimportant character who is only mentioned with by his unfortunate death prior to the trip to the underworld.  Also, the ghosts of famous women section, at least in my opinion, was pointless because the majority of these women haven't been brought up in previous sections or they are not commonplace names.  The sections over Agamemnon and Achilles were all right, they did bring some conclusion if you had read The Iliad, but they did bring in new information that didn't fit very well, such as Achilles having a son who fought in the Trojan War also.  The Ghost of Ajax was in my opinion decent.  My main problem was that it was extremely short and again brought in information that didn't further the Odyssey.  

Odysseus.  Web Source:  Hellenica

   In summation, I felt like these 6 or so sections took up too much of the reading and detracted from the total story.  In fact most of the information was summed up at the beginning of The Sirens, Scylla, and Charybdis, where it says that Odysseus got information on the Sirens, Scylla, and Charybdis.  Instead, while I don't know whether this would have worked, but I would have preferred to have some information on when he returns home or even other adventures along the way.  I understand it might not have worked due to a large portion of the book remaining, but I felt like better sections could have been used.  When I finished the Odyssey, I felt like I had watched parts of, for example, the Lord of the Rings where Frodo is on his adventure to Mordor to destroy the One Ring, but never actually saw him destroy it and instead maybe stopped halfway through.  Sure, the majority of parts were good, but without the conclusion you are left somewhat wanting.