Final Reactions to The Odyssey

This week I finished reading The Odyssey.  I found the ending really interesting.  Now that I am done reading it, I can say that even though it wasn’t my favorite, it definitely wasn’t as bad as I thought it was.

First, this week I read about Ulysses finally taking revenge on the suitors, and reuniting with his wife and father.  I was really glad when he killed Antinous first, out of all the suitors, because Antinous was such a cruel and evil person.  It was interesting how the second worst suitor, Eurymachus, tried to blame all of the suitors’ evils on Antinous so that Ulysses wouldn’t kill the rest of them.  Eurymachus would not own up to all of his own evil deeds.  I think that when the women were killed, it seemed like they were killed a crueler way, even though the things they did weren’t as bad compared to the suitors.  Then, when Ulysses finally revealed himself to his wife, I was so glad, because throughout the whole book, all Penelope ever did was mourn the loss of her husband.  The very end of the book, however, didn’t seem very good to me.  It ended with Minerva making peace between the families of the dead suitors, and Ulysses.  But, only one sentence was used to say this, and it seemed like it ended too soon.  It didn’t fully wrap up the story.

I’ve noticed many things while reading this epic poem.  One is that repetition is used throughout the story.  It gets annoying when you’re reading it, but it makes sense that it’s there because the story used to be told out loud, and had to be memorized.  The line that probably gets repeated the most is “rosy-fingered dawn.”  Another line is “tell me, and tell me true.”  Also, throughout the book, the men(in many cases) seem to treat the women badly.  One example would be Telemachus, who says many things to his mother that come off as really rude.  One time, when Penelope was telling Eurymachus that the stranger(Ulysses) should be able to string the bow that all the suitors were trying to string, Telemachus told his mother that no one but him has any say in if someone gets the bow or not, and she should busy herself inside.  He said that the bow was a man’s matter, which seemed really rude.  Also, I noticed that the climax of this story is near the end.  The majority of the book is action that sets the story up for when Ulysses returns and kills all of the suitors.

The reading this week was very interesting.  Overall, the story came to a good end.