Para-Narratives in the Odyssey

This book offers the first full-length study in English of the relationship between the Odyssey’s main narrative and its para-narratives, the secondary narratives and episodes in a minor key which frequently suspend its progress. Many of the latter group take the form of paradigmatic secondary narratives about matters apparently external to the poem, which are related by the poet and his characters. For the characters, such stories may provide a model of action for imitation or avoidance in their immediate contexts. At a deeper level, they influence the reception of some aspect of the main narrative by the poet’s audience. They draw on Cyclic Epic, folk tales and international stories, alleged personal experience (the material of αἶνος‎), and mythology, which may be altered if necessary to achieve a closer correspondence to the parallel situation in the main narrative. Where details are suppressed or altered, the audience may still experience the reverberations of the better-known version of the tradition: this is particularly apparent in the poem’s unusual use of the Oresteia story. Analogous or parallel situations are inserted into the narrative itself, so that one episode resembles and sheds light on another. Minor-key episodes narrated in the poet’s voice reflect on significant episodes of the main narrative and influence and guide its interpretation. As the poem draws to its close, religious rituals, particularly the Plynteria and Arrephoria, become another kind of para-narrative, their procedures mimicked by the characters as they undergo the transitions effected at the poem’s dénouement.