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Odysseus In The Odyssey

Decent Essays

Aubrey Drake Graham, a Canadian, singer, actor, and song writer once said “Sometimes it’s the journey that teaches you a lot about your destination.” In other words, Drake cherishes the journey as it provides deeper insight to the destination by allowing for personal evolution and development. Similarly, in the classic piece of literature The Odyssey, the author, Homer creates a central theme that tends to demonstrate that the journey is more important than the destination as most of the epic is told as a flashback of the long-hard journey Odysseus traveled to reach home. Along Odysseus’ 20 year journey home, he is able to learn the crucial lessons of cleverness versus strength, perseverance against the pull of temptation, and the value of family.
Along the way, Odysseus and his crew encounter several challenges that will potentially lead them astray from their goal. These temptations help them grow because it shows their ability to fight against the bribes and will also create value to home that hasn’t entirely been there. In the case of the …show more content…

The author then, ends the poem with the phrase, “And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you. / Wise as you will have become, so full of experience, / you will have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.”(35-37). The author cleverly hints that the value of a journey is not determined by the physical treasures you will encounter, but by the wisdom and insight you will have gained by taking that journey. The quotation allows for readers to grasp the idea that the destination inspires the voyage, but without the voyage, nothing will change. You cannot learn from arriving at your target. The path you take, whether it be safe or life-taking, it’s better to know you attempted and failed than not knowing what could’ve

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