Friday, May 8, 2009

Walcott's The Odyssey Part 1

I decided to split this post into two because I wanted to talk about the play in terms of the men versus the women, specifically Billy Blue and Odysseus first and then a briefer post on the women.

Billy Blue was one of my favorite characters out of all the books I read this year. He's a perfect mix between a very personalized and stylized character and an example of literary traditions. The images he describes had so much personality to them. You sort of felt like you were seeing the environment through an islander's eyes. Or at least someone who loved the location. He had a very jazz musician vibe, rhythmic, cultural, story teller. I already wrote a paper on what he says, so I'm not going into it, but he gets a lot of the great lines in the play. In Shakespeare's plays I always love the fools, like Puck is my favorite character in a Midsummer's Night Dream. Billy Blue is definitely a sort of fool-like character. Joking and perceptive he's an insider and an outsider at the same time, moving throughout the story as he pleases.

Odysseus is more flawed in Walcott's play, but to a certain extent he's also more realistic. Maybe he's not more realistic but he seems like a more common depiction or a soldier's personality. War supposedly makes men more ruthless more self centered. Which makes sense, so when Walcott immediately introduces his Odysseus as a harder more common man, and less of a super hero I can feel unoffended by it. Odysseus is definitely less of THE MAN in this play and I liked that because I've read the Odyssey four times now, and it was kind of cool to see a new side of him. The scene of the Cyclops was also really cool. It's really an archetype of the poem so I can see why Walcott chose this to be his moment of political comment. It was a little abrupt maybe, but I think it was so interesting that it sort of drew you in.

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