There are merely eight more chapters to the end of Homer's Odyssey before I once again take on James Joyce's Ulysses, which bears the same name to the former tale but is a modern interpretation of it, totally different in every way. The classic epic focuses on Odysseus' heroic return to Ithaca after a ten-year exile brought upon by the wrath of the gods for his seige on Troy; Joyce's modern rewrite takes place over the span of a single day and features the lives of ordinary struggling mortals as its protagonists: Stephen Dedalus as Telemachus who - in the original epic goes on a journey to search for his father Odysseus - searches for a father figure; Leopold Bloom as Odysseus who, unlike the godlike hero, is just an ordinary man going about his business; and Molly Bloom as Penelope who, unlike the faithful wife of Odysseus, has affairs with other men. Joyce's Ulysses goes against every understanding of the hero's journey; it is its complete anti-thesis - the anti-hero's journey - which, including his genius of giving every chapter its own literary style, turning it into a novelty more than a novel - makes this the (supposedly) greatest piece of work written in the last century.
So here, here, Jack Kerouac speaks of On The Road. For the sake of a common word, a man sacrifices himself.
No comments:
Post a Comment