i straight up do not believe that odysseus did everything he did to get back to penelope and telemakhos. or even that he did everything he could. wanting to return to them is not the whole story. i like the myth about odysseus pretending to be mad to get out of the war for lots of reasons, but one of them is because it's an attempt to escape the narrative, foiled by his love for his son, but also because there is contrast to what we know of him long after the narrative has sucked him back in. odysseus is no less kleospilled than anyone else! he fights for his pride; he makes mistakes; he gets worn down; he delays his homecoming, in ways that are and aren't his fault, all the time. he wants to go home. he doesn't just want to go home.
but he does try. by leaving ogygia he willingly goes back into the narrative one more time, and he never gives up until he finally returns. isn't that compelling enough? do we have to sand it down?
another reason this tension interests me is that odysseus does seem to question if it was all worth it. at least by the point that we meet him, twenty years on. that doesn't hit as hard if he wasn't invested in the war at all, right? if there's no definitive moment where he gets peace, there's also no definitive moment where he gets anything the war promised, either. there's that provocative simile where songs about troy make him weep like a woman whose husband has been killed, who is about to be taken into slavery, a condition he inflicted on countless trojan women. the sirens promise a version of the war that makes sense of his suffering. so he must be wondering.
but it's all very well for achilles in the underworld to say it's better to be alive without glory than dead with it: he doesn't have a choice anymore. but when odysseus tells that story, too, he must still be wondering. was it worth it? what can i do that would make it worth it?
