Change of Perspective with the Odyssey and O Brother, Where Art Thou?

Clearly, there are a lot of similarities between Odysseus and Everett McGill in O Brother, Where Art Thou? (they are both leaders, they are both trying to get home to their wife and children, they both face many obstacles along the way, etc.). In the same way, there are a lot of similarities between Penelope and Penny (they are both strong women in a culture where men traditionally have much more power, they are both very crafty in keeping men they don’t love or want to marry at bay, etc.). All of these similarities are somewhat superficial, however, because they only exist if you look at the characters from an objective point of view.

To clarify what I mean, let us consider Odysseus from Penelope’s point of view and Everett from Penny’s point of view. To Penelope, Odysseus is a hero, struggling to find his way home to her. Even after twenty years, she retains hope that he is still alive, and pushes all of the suitors away. To her, he is the rightful king of the land, and no one else deserves to take his throne as long as his death is not confirmed. Penny’s opinion of Everett is almost the exact opposite. She sees him as somewhat of a fraud, practicing law without a license, and takes advantage of his arrest to marry someone who is “bona fide.” Even when he comes back, she wants to go through with the wedding, and she to tries to get Everett to go away by explaining to him that he was hit by a train.

If we reverse this, and look at Penelope from Odysseus’s point of view and Penny from Everett’s point of view, we again see that they are vastly different. Penelope is loyal to him, and although she has an inkling of what is going on when Odysseus appears disguised as a beggar, she doesn’t say anything and lets his scheme to get rid of the suitors come to fruition. Penny, on the other hand, irritates Everett to no end, and interferes as much as possible with his plan to win her back. He sees her as being extremely irrational, trying to claim that he was hit by a train and asking him to retrieve their old wedding ring from the bottom of the flooded valley.

It seems, then, that although the story the Cohn brothers tell in O Brother, Where Art Thou? is based on the Odyssey, and we as the audience notice many similarities between the two, the characters themselves would have the opposite view, and would feel very out of place if they were to switch roles.

Odysseus Doesn't Deserve his Reputation

            From the beginning of the Odyssey, Odysseus is set up to be a legendary hero, who uses his immense strength and cunning to overcome twenty years of obstacles and return home to Ithaca. His renown is so widespread that the audience is expected to have heard rumors of him, and 3,000 years later his story is still remembered as one of the greatest hero’s journey stories of all time. Does he really deserve such a great reputation though? I’m not sure. I think if I had read the Odyssey without any western cultural influence telling me Odysseus is a hero, I would think very differently of him. I would probably see him as a reasonably intelligent man who is good at weaseling out of trouble, but who still has some fundamental character flaws, and so is certainly not worthy of the heroic reputation he achieved.

            The build-up of this reputation starts with the invocation of the Muse, on the very first page of the epic. “Many pains he suffered,” Homer says, “heartsick on the open sea, fighting to save his life and bring his comrades home. But he could not save them from disaster, hard as he strove – the recklessness of their own ways destroyed them all, the blind fools” (1.5-9).  Ironically, this single paragraph, meant as praise for Odysseus, describes everything that I think he should have done better on his way home.

            Let’s start with the most frustrating phrase in the invocation, which in my opinion is the assertion that Odysseus is “heartsick on the open sea.” Sure, he misses Penelope and stuff, but he literally sleeps with Circe for a year before even remembering that he is supposed to go home (note also that in this case we don’t see Odysseus trying “bring his comrades home,” but rather those “blind fools” reminding him that they need to leave Circe’s island). Then, after washing up on Calypso’s island, he sleeps with her for ten years before leaving. Again, sure, he cried about it every morning, but the fact that he still chose to sleep with Calypso is evidence enough that he isn’t really that heartsick. Finally, when he gets back to Ithaca, he still doesn’t reunite with Penelope immediately, but instead plots with Athena and comes up with some overblown scheme to massacre all of the suitors, when just revealing himself to them would probably have been enough to get most of them to leave anyway.

            Homer follows this in the invocation by saying that Odysseus “could not save [his men] from disaster, hard as he strove – the recklessness of their own ways destroyed them all, the blind fools.” This once again suggests something completely false – that Odysseus, the leader of the men, is completely blameless in their demise. It was he who lead them to Polyphemus’s lair in the ridiculous hope that a cyclops would show them hospitality, it was he who didn’t tell them to watch out for Scylla, and he who didn’t tell them about the bag of winds from Aeolus, which led indirectly to them being blown away from Ithaca.

            All in all, Odysseus doesn’t seem like a guy I would trust with my men (if I had men). Although he is good at getting himself out of trouble, much of that is luck, and he takes a lot of unnecessary risks that get him into trouble in the first place. He doesn’t at all live up to his description in the invocation of the Muse, and this leads him to take twenty years to return home alone, all of his men having died along the way.

Smithy's Emotionless Heroism

For most of the beginning of the book until somewhere in the middle of his journey, Smithy is a frustratingly unemotional character. Sure, he feels embarrassed by his “huge belly” and “fat ass,” and is always self-conscious around women, but he never really feels any emotion when it comes to other people around him. At the very least, he suppresses these emotions to the point where they are not important enough to be included in his narrative, and this makes it almost impossible for him to make friends or stand up for himself when people exploit him.

When he is run over by Carl and taken to the hospital, for example, the amount of treatment and attention he gets compared to the amount Carl gets is negligible, especially given the state he is in when he wakes up in the hospital: “I had a headache, and my balls hurt. I pulled my shirt over my head. The blood down my arm came from a slice just below the back of my neck. I wet a paper towel, two towels, and washed it down. I washed my arms. The caked blood ran blackish. My ass was pretty cut, small cuts, but my underwear was soaked with blood.” Clearly, what Smithy needs most at this point is rest. He needs someone to at least help him take care of himself, if not clean the blood off for him. Certainly, he does not need the stress of having to clean himself off in the bathroom and deal with his clothes (or lack thereof) alone. Instead, he somehow ends up being twisted into taking care of Carl instead of the other way around. “‘You’ve got your hands full,’” the nurse tells him. “‘Seriously, though, if Carl didn’t assure us you could take care good care of him, we wouldn’t release him. He speaks very highly of you.’” Somehow, though, Smithy is more embarrassed than angry. He has literally just been forced to take care of a random guy who ran him over, and yet he is willing to stay with Carl and help him.

This sort of passive heroism, where Smithy does not allow himself to get antagonized by others, is something that I don’t think we give him enough credit for. He does it all the time – recall the moment when he is shot by the policeman, for example, after he saves Kenny’s life. Logically, what he does makes sense – why go to all the trouble of holding a grudge against someone when neither you nor they can go back in time and change what happened? For most of us, though, it would be extremely difficult to keep our emotions in check in a situation like this, and although the reason that Smithy is able to do it is probably not one of purely logical reasoning, it is still something we should acknowledge and respect.