Term Paper on "Homer Dante"

Term Paper 4 pages (1495 words) Sources: 5 Style: MLA

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Homer, Dante

Homer and Dante

In Homer's, the Odyssey and Dante's, the Inferno, we see the universal quest of the hero. But there is a difference. The Odyssey is an epic adventure that would certainly be deemed heroic in its very being. The Inferno, on the other hand, is less overtly so. It is more of a personal journey, told in first person by the writer himself, Dante Alighieri. But in this difference we find the synthesis of universal truths and see that they are both heroes' quests nonetheless. The theme is of the hero's journey of first deconstruction, the journey out, and then reconstruction, the journey back. It is the deconstruction of old ways and habits of everyday thinking that are thrown to the wind. Then the reconstruction is of the personality in light of this new awareness in the depth and breadth of the universe. The hero then has been changed in the light of a new understanding of life and the possibilities of what reality is and can be.

Both tales start rather oddly; their beginnings are not quite beginnings, but middles. In the Inferno we find Dante saying that he is, "In the midway of this our mortal life, I found me in a gloomy wood, astray Gone from the path direct..." (Alighieri 1). He is saying that he is in midlife, and at the time he was actually thirty-five years old. Also that he is lost. One hesitates to use the term "mid-life crisis," but perhaps it is not so strange. After all it is usually a crisis of some kind that necessitates the journey in the first place.

Then in the Odyssey we discover that the hero of our tale, Odysseus, has already been on his quest for ten years, and that he is lost as well. "Of the cunning hero, the wanderer, blown off course time and again" (Homer 1). In fact he does not even show up in the narrative until the fifth chapter. What does this say about the hero's journey? It is that children or young warriors are not yet equipped to handle the more mythical nature of this quest, they lack the patience perhaps. It is only after a good deal of time and experience spent in this world does one have strong enough footing to travel into the world of myth, or in psychological terms, the subconscious, a later life rite of passage.

The hero's journey, by and large, is composed of certain universal steps. The master mythologist, Joseph Campbell, expertly laid out these steps in his book, the Hero with a Thousand Faces. All these heroic adventures, by natural course, begin in what we call the phenomenal world, the real world that surrounds us. Then through the course of the tale we often come to question our perceptions of the real world. The second step required step is a call to action or a quest and that is where these two tales begin.

One of the striking differences in these two quests is that one is full of a pantheon of gods and goddesses and the other is full of people. Homer gives us a lesson in Greek mythology and introduces us to many of their gods, yet they are somehow familiar. These gods have all too human attributes of love, greed, jealously, pride and so on. They are in essence human except for the fact that they are immortal and have power over nature. This reminds one of Jungian Archetypes, large scale emotional and psychological myths that represent the subconscious in human beings (Jung), except that these gods have the power to make their needs a reality, while humans may only be able to dream about it. However, this dreaming, these myths, reveal a panorama of psychological depth that is unattainable otherwise.

In Dante's Inferno we find the more personal aspect of these gods embodied in the population of hell. This seems at first in opposition to the lofty symbols of the Greek gods as presented in the Odyssey. However, the archetypes here are also easily recognizable and familiar.

But what is hell? Cardinal Dulles gives us the generally accepted Christian view:

As we know from the Gospels, Jesus spoke many times about hell. Throughout his preaching, he holds forth two and only two final possibilities for human existence: the one being everlasting happiness in the presence of God, the other everlasting torment in the absence of God. (Dulles)

The Hades of Homer… READ MORE

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