The Odyssey: The Curious Hero And Odysseus

Every character can be connected to another in a certain form or fashion. Even the child that cannot empathize, Christopher, can be compared to the great warrior of legend, Odysseus. Even though their stories seem so different many similarities can be found. Similarly, the same can be said about them as people and the emotions they go through in their stories. It is said that two people can be linked by six degrees. That makes comparing Chris from The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime to Odysseus from The Odyssey one-hundred percent possible. That means that the statement, Christopher and Odysseus are similar because they both express courage, grief, and love their stories, is not that far fetched. Both of these characters show …show more content…
Odysseus went through much grief as his friends were killed by monsters. A prime example is the story of them on the island of the cyclops. "Neither rely nor pity am from him, but in one stride he clutched my companions and caught two in his hands like squirming puppies to beat the brains out, spattering the floor. He then dismembered them and made his meal, gasping and crunching like a mountain lion"(Homer 723). This set the mood of Odysseus to be very protective of his crew, because they were his friends and he wanted them to live. Chris also experienced grief when his friend Toby, the rat, died. When this happened, "I put Toby into the pocket inside my jacket and he went very quiet and he didn 't move"(Haddon 127), he didn 't realize it, but Toby had died. A lot of grief came over him and what 's worse was that no one could truly understand what this meant to Chris. But again, this helped shape Chris to be a different and better person than …show more content…
In the Odyssey, Odysseus is separated from his wife and child for almost 20 years. He spends many of the years at war, then stuck on an island, and then traveling at sea until he finally gets home. On the island, he is seen crying, "But when day came, he sat on the rocky shore and broke his own heart groaning, with eyes wet scanning the bare horizons of the sea"(Homer 717). He is stuck wanting to see his wife and son but can 't. For Chris, love is a little different. He has his loved ones like his parents and Toby but he doesn 't understand that what he feels is love. This is shown in how his dad does something special to show that he loves Chris since Chris doesn 't like hugs. "We do this because sometimes Father wants to give me a hug, but I do not like hugging people, so we do this instead, and it means that he loves me"(Haddon 15). Even so love has shaped Chris and Odysseus to be better