The way Homer conveys his stories to the audience :: Literature

The Way Homer Conveys his Stories to the Audience Homer who wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey used a number of different techniques to convey his poems and stories to his audience. I will be writing about these in this essay. Right from the beginning of Book 9 we see Homer’s ability to convey the story well, he starts it with a monologue from Odysseus to King Alcinous on his adventure. It gets right into the action which would’ve held his audiences interest throughout. He finds ways to get around justifying things by ‘pushing’ Odysseus right out of the known world round Cape Malea into the unknown. He is then allowed to create a fictional world, another dimension where he cant be corrected. He creates islands and peoples, whole civilisations of monsters. This I believe is an excellent example of Homers good composition. He also weaves all these stories together from old folk tales and although there are some slight mistakes he was reciting it by mouth so couldn’t just press the ‘backspace key’ he had to carry on even if he had made a mistake. The Cyclops story and others were probably not told together like they are in the Odyssey, they would’ve been told by different groups and tribes around fires. So this is another example of well Homer composes the whole story into one massive epic poem which is the Odyssey. Another example of his good composition is how he makes the whole thing into a formula, in formulaic epithet. Not many people could probably do that straight away. He sometimes goes on auto-pilot by using the same phrases. E.g. â€Å"As soon as Dawn appeared, fresh and rosy-fingered.† This shows another good example of Homer’s composition excellence. Homer does make mistakes though, he sometimes when trying to weave the folk tales gets them jumbled up and doesn’t correct them. E.g. â€Å"The Cyclops then washed this meal down with unwatered milk† It was not normal then to water milk and isn’t now. We believe Homer made this mistake purposefully, as in the original the Cyclops may have been drinking wine but that would mean the rest of the story wouldn’t work so he quickly replaced wine with milk but didn’t get rid of unwatered.