Homer's Epic is Epically Rewritten.10/29/2021 Despite being one of the many rewrites of Homer’s Odyssey, Zachary Mason has managed to complete a novel that followed the greatness of the original plot while maintaining an original mindset and areas for readers’ imagination. Usually, most readers, including myself, hate when plot holes force us to think in ways we never thought we would in order to set the rest of the story. However, Mason makes it possible to enjoy this aspect and is awarded for his series of “what ifs”. We go through our lives always thinking of things we could have done differently such as “what if I completed my homework an hour earlier”, “what if I bought that shirt tomorrow instead of today”, or “what would have happened if World War II never even occurred?” These leave room for interpretation and individual understanding of the events.
Mason incorporates these ideas into his Lost Books of the Odyssey. He finds ways to spin the plot, not in a negative sense, but rather as a way to challenge the ideas and wonders of the character itself. For example, Odysseus as written by Homer has ways of developing stories to tell about events he experiences. In Mason’s version he is using those stories and other events that happened to challenge Odysseus’s way of thinking and it makes readers wonder what is true and what is not. By showing these possible changes in the original story, readers start to wonder if they have interpreted it wrong the entire time. Odysseus could have been the bad guy, or the opposite gender, or completely insane that he made up the whole story of his journey home after the war. Mason makes us questions the original tale in ways we did not know we could. These second thoughts cause questions to arise to Homer and whether or not we should have believed him in the first place when incorporating the story of Odysseus along with the tales of Greek myths into his writing of the Odyssey.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |