Here is a link to another Reddit post that goes into more detail: [https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/pvgbot/cmv\_the\_odyssey\_is\_not\_a\_good\_book/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/pvgbot/cmv_the_odyssey_is_not_a_good_book/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
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I am willing to change my mind on this. I understand that I could be completely, totally, utterly wrong and I am making a buffoon of myself on the Internet. I am posting this here *so* I can change my mind and see the Odyssey for what it truly is. And yes, I know it is not a book, but a poem. I have a whole footnote on this.
The Odyssey is objectively bad. It breaks every single modern writing/storytelling rule that exists.\* The characters are relatively boring, and the plot itself is horrendously poorly constructed. To top it all off, there are very little “themes” or “depth” worth writing about(I will get into this in a moment). By all counts, it doesn’t seem to me to be something worth talking about.
Before I get into my next point, let me start off by saying that I am incredibly fascinated with the Classics. Every level, from literature to history to linguistics to culture. I simply see no reason for the Odyssey to be taught in schools or studied at a high level.
To me, the Odyssey is really hard to read casually. The only part of the story that is readable is the first half(you could even say that the only part worth reading is Books 9-13). At about book 13, the entire story is dragged on. In my opinion, books 13-24 could be condensed into a single book. It is just so repetitive, and I don’t see why it needs to be. The whole time as I was reading it, I was thinking to myself, “I get it, these suitors are terrible people!” This is one of the many examples where there is zero depth to a character. I think Athena may be the only character that I could look closer at and see something different to what I saw before. Don’t get me wrong, Odysseus has many character traits. But they are drilled into me with epithets and the most blatant breaking of the rule “show, don’t tell”
So what about in a non-casual setting? Like, in a literature class? Well, if you look at it as a lens into ancient civilizations and the stories they told each other, then its perfectly fine. My problem is, it is a terrible story and we should not be reading it. In literature classes, we read it like it was a piece of fine literature- which it really shouldn’t be.
I guess to sum up that previous point in better words, the story can tell us about the Greeks, but there is nothing to study about the story itself. I guess you could call that a TLDR.
\*All right, I know why you are here. “The Odyssey isn’t a book. Its a poem!” Yes, yes it is a poem, how astute of you. And while it can provide very meaningful insight to the *structure of poems*\- Indeed, on that count it may be one of the best- the fact that it is taught in *Literature* classes, or the fact that the story is even studied at all is crazy to me. The literature of the Odyssey is not good. The story is actually so bad. The syntax of the poem itself is good. I think that there is a meaningful distinction there.
by alleida334
27 Comments
Why the fuck are you applying modern standards to Ancient Literature?
This is the dumbest thing I’ve seen all day.
It’s an adventure novella divided in different little stories/adventures with an overall love ARC.
I do enjoy it, especially when bundled with artwork.
Finally a post we can all hate together
I think your problem is applying *modern* storytelling tropes and rules to a piece of literature at least 2600 years old
Bruh…this is beyond moronic
>It breaks every single modern writing/storytelling rule that exists.
It is a 3000-year-old piece of poetry, of course it doesn’t follow modern storytelling conventions.
I stopped reading after that because I knew it would go even further into ignorance
If you choose to use modern standards to read premodern books, then you’re often going to find yourself disappointed. You can read Gilgamesh with expectations about Aristotelian unities and twentieth-century character development and just sit there confused.
Or
You can make the choice to learn something about a society and its culture before you read its great literature, and to find out what people at the time thought was so worthy about the book – that allows you to appreciate it and understand why it’s considered a classic.
You say there are no themes worth writing about, but literally thousands of scholars have written about them. For millennia people have gotten caught up by the characters of Odysseus and Penelope. The adventures and their meaning, then and as developed in Western literature right up to the current day, are a lot of people’s idea of a good read.
I read it for pleasure in high school. Then we studied parts of it in a couple of classes in college, including one looking at it for what it had to say about women and sexual pleasure before the Judeo-Christian hammer came down, and one where we looked at it in the context of symbolic voyages like Dante’s. We really didn’t run out of things to say about it.
You certainly don’t have to like it. But “objectively bad.” “By all counts it doesn’t seem worth talking about”… no. You’re at a kiddy-pool level of knowledge criticizing an ocean of a book.
All you’ve made clear is that you don’t understand what “literature” means.
I can’t tell if you’re joking or not, but this post is moronic.
Also, The Odyssey isn’t even a poem in the modern sense. It’s an oral epic that was written down 2600 years ago.
You mention that you are ‘incredibly fascinated with the Classics’ at ‘every level’ (what ever that means), so just to give you a shot at defending the babybrain hill you have staked out for yourself, what kind of ‘Classic’ really speaks to you? Like, anything else from this place/cultural moment?
Not engaging with this. Clearly you have some sort of dark sexual proclivity for being yelled at on the internet.
I think the second paragraph of your post is where you lost most of us, and the asterisks didn’t even address the biggest problem here: the fact that you are using modern conventions to analyze a work that is hundreds of years old.
Of course it’s not going to match up with the modern standards of storytelling or poetry writing. The work itself isn’t modern to begin with and was created in a time where creative standards were radically different. I’m sure if you took a modern work and brought it into the past, people would find it strange.
>It breaks every single modern writing/storytelling rule that exists
It’s not modern, it’s ancient. And there aren’t actually very many rules about telling stories, there are lots of helpful guidelines that skilled authors can ignore to serve their ends and a few fundamental truths.
It was beloved by entire civilizations for longer than my country has existed, and cherished by their intellectual descendants for thousands of years afterwards. If it isn’t compatible with your understanding of what makes a good story… perhaps the problem lies with *you*, rather than the world.
Ancient literature doesn’t meet my modern subjective standards, therefore, I declare it objectively bad.
That’s some top tier logic you’ve got working for you.
You understand The Odyssey is meant to be performed/recited?
Look, other people are roasting you for trying to judge (and declare a failure) an ancient text by “modern storytelling standards,” and rightly so. But genuinely I hope that your takeaway from all this is just that you should not be applying some nebulous concept of “proper storytelling” to a work *in general*. You should try meeting literary works–including, yes, epic poems–on their own merits, to try to imagine what they were trying to achieve and to get into their rhythm. That’s going to open up a whole universe of new literature to you and will widen your horizons in general.
(Also, generally speaking, wouldn’t “it doesn’t succeed by so-called modern standards” mean you have to disqualify many, many texts that are older than 50+ years? I can assure you that Shakepeare or Dickens or Melville also don’t write in a “modern” way, and if you try to judge their works according to current trends you’re just going to dismiss them also.)
2024 New Year Resolution: Stop getting upset over r/books posts from philistines.
What sort of frames are you bringing to the text? It seems like the entirety of your analytical equipment here are narrativity and characterization, neither of which were even really concepts at the time of writing.
If you’ve genuinely studied literature for years and have no understanding of or capacity for historicity, you might need to study more.
This take is so bad it objectively hurts us all
“I don’t like Elvis because his music wasn’t recorded and mixed digitally and so it sounds kinda weird.”
On the other hand, The Odyssey is very good
>It breaks every single modern writing/storytelling rule that exists.*
I checked your * to see if you covered your bases on how “writing rules” are quite literally not set in stone, and are less “rules” and more “guidelines that you can follow if you want but don’t have to under any circumstances”, but you didn’t.
So I stopped reading after that. But, two things.
First, The Odyssey is old. So old, in fact, that it very likely can be attributed to playing a major part in the literal creation of the “rules” that have evolved into what they are today.
Second, it’s a good story. It’s captivated audiences for *millenia*. That doesn’t happen with horrible stories – unless it’s a religion. So to outright call it “bad” is not just disingenuous, but outright factually false.
A+ troll, thanks for the laugh 😂
room temp iq post
Its all themes man lol, the whole thing is themed about hubris. Every single line.
“All modern writing is objectively bad. It breaks every single ancient Greek epic poem writing/storytelling rule that exists.”
You don’t understand the word objective or how it’s used, since you immediately follow it up with two subjective reasons for labeling The Odyssey objectively bad.
This makes you appear uninformed and novice in your critique and it’s hard to take it seriously.
You need to work on your basic comprehension of literary critique before you can tackle something as universally praised as a time worn classic.