The Odyssey

This section of the narrative relates the full story of Odysseus’s travels, beginning with his departure from Troy and describing the decade of wandering that brings him to Phaeacia. During his wanderings, Odysseus must demonstrate endurance above all, and in addition to The Challenges of Heroism and Leadership, he experiences displacement, danger, and loss, and his only compass is his intense desire to return home to his family and his country. Amid these challenges, Odysseus displays a unique approach to leadership and often employs cunning and trickery to achieve his goals, along with extreme self-control. On the island of the sun god, for instance, Odysseus manages to refrain from eating the sacred cattle even when he and his men are starving. Although his men succumb to their hunger and ultimately endanger the voyage, Odysseus’s iron will maintains the momentum of the arduous journey. 

In fact, Odysseus’s self-control is so important that his lapses in this area often prove fatal to his men. This dynamic becomes clear at the conclusion of his encounter with Polyphemus, for when he taunts the Cyclops and reveals his own identity, he brings down the wrath of Poseidon, who deprives the rash hero and his men of their homecoming. Similarly, when Odysseus relaxes his guard and falls asleep within sight of Ithaca, his wayward men open Aeolus’s bag of winds and drive them off course. Thus, although Odysseus’s self-control helps him to survive, his companions, lacking his guidance in key moments, make deadly mistakes that he would have avoided as a matter of course.

Odysseus also undergoes a distinct inner transformation during his travels. Immediately after the Trojan War, Odysseus and his men continue their role as city-sackers, plundering the city of the Ciconians. However, once they sail beyond the known world, Odysseus must adopt a much more circumspect approach to survive the dangers of the land of the Lotus Eaters, the cyclopes, Circe, and even the Underworld. These adventures give Odysseus opportunities to use his great cunning to solve problems and avoid direct conflicts, as is demonstrated by his clever plot to escape the cave of the cyclops, Polyphemus. Throughout these adventures, Odysseus’s actions highlight The Challenges of Heroism and Leadership, for despite his intelligence and gift for strategy, Odysseus is far from a perfect leader: His curiosity to explore the island of the cyclopes, for instance, leads to the violent deaths of several of his companions. However, Odysseus’s narration also emphasizes that in most cases, his problems arise from the rash actions of his rebellious men. When Odysseus’s men resist his orders to leave the island of the Ciconians, they are attacked, and many lose their lives. Likewise, in the land of the Lotus Eaters, some of Odysseus’s men taste the lotus plant and lose their desire to return home. Notably, the fault for these misfortunes is left up to interpretation, for although Odysseus blames his men, he is nonetheless the leader of the party, and his first-person narration may hold an element of unreliability driven by pride.

Throughout the graphic novel, Hinds enhances the original narrative by dedicating a wealth of artistic attention to depicting the fantastical nature of Odysseus’s travels, which take the hero beyond the boundaries of the ordinary human world. In Hinds’s whimsical interpretation, the floating island of Aeolus, with its solid bronze wall, is imbued with an almost steampunk aesthetic, and the gloom of the Underworld is visually translated into bleak, menacing shades of gray and brown. Odysseus’s journey also strips his party of the security of civilization, for the cyclopes lack agriculture and houses, fail to honor the gods, and mistreat their guests. Similarly, the Laestrygonians prove themselves to be just as cannibalistic as the cyclopes. Because piety and hospitality are the marks of civilization in ancient Greek culture, the cyclopes and Laestrygonians epitomize the uncivilized and monstrous elements that lie in wait beyond the boundaries of the known world.

Within this context, Odysseus’s wanderings also demonstrate The Role of Divine Intervention in Human Affairs, for the hero receives crucial help from the gods, as when Hermes tells him how to beat Circe and later conveys the order to Calypso that she must let Odysseus go. Yet these acts of divine intervention are also countered by acts of divine interference. The episode with Polyphemus earns Odysseus a powerful enemy in the wrathful Poseidon, whose favor he would have been wiser to court to travel safely over the seas to Ithaca. After Odysseus blinds Polyphemus, the cyclops calls on Poseidon to punish Odysseus, and even other gods shy away from helping the wayward hero. Aeolus, for instance, refuses to help Odysseus when he sees that “the gods must truly despise [him]” (114). Later, Odysseus and his men also anger Helios, the sun god, by harming his sacred cattle. Odysseus’s divine enemies thus leave him shipwrecked and crewless, and only when his divine patron, Athena, intervenes on his behalf does he finally manage to return home successfully.