Odysseus Long Journey Back Home In Homer's The Odyssey

Homer’s The Odyssey is a timeless piece of literature that tackles such complex themes as gender and cultural relations, as well as more human themes like love and loyalty, all in a truly classic style that is revered even today. Odysseus’ long journey back home is grueling and harrowing and this fact is only intensified by what his family must endure back home in Ithaka. Though Odysseus may be preoccupied with difficult challenges as he makes his way back home, it is Odysseus’ nearly constant longing for home that enables him to so strongly persevere as he does in The Odyssey. Odysseus relies on his crew in part to keep him on task, and they often remind him to keep going on his path, though it may be troublesome and difficult at times. At the end of Odysseus and his crew’s year-long stay on Kirke’s island, Homer writes, “But when the passing months and wheeling seasons / brought the long summery days, the pause of summer ,/ my shipmates one day summoned me and said: / ‘Captain, shake off this trance, and think of home- / if home indeed awaits us, / if we shall ever see / your own well-timbered hall on Ithaka’” (book X, p. 179). By saying that …show more content…
If he hadn’t had such an intense yearning for home, Odysseus may have stayed forever with Kirke, or perhaps even have married Naussika. Odysseus may not have even survived what he did, since the goal of home was something that he would have been blind to. The concept of home is something that is valued by all, however they may perceive it. Though most have not been through the trials that Odysseus had to endure, anybody can look back on a time in their life when they had to withstand a storm, to brave a struggle. Perhaps what keeps humans human, and always surviving, is the thought of home, the possibility of finding/being back in that place where one feels as though one