shashankbdf2

What am I to say about one of the early stories ever told? It's not easy, I guess. The book would be hard to read for someone who isn't used to hard reading, and is honestly hard for anyone to read. The story is classic, but does show its age. First of all is the names. All the names. Everyone gets a name. There really is an entire three pages of people on the side of the Greeks getting named, their fathers getting named, and their ships getting named, and their lands they're from getting named. It is understandable for the time the story was first created, yes, but it does get old after awhile, as it drags on the text at times. There are also times when the characters are refereed to by the names of their fathers, or as the son of their fathers. It gets a tiny bit confusing, but if you were able to read through most of the book, it wont really matter. Metaphors also make the book hard to read. In fact, I would go and say that half the book is all metaphors. Homer seemed to have an odd fascination with lions, wolves, bulls, and other large animals, because he is constantly referring to his characters in like terms. They can become confusing, and the use of them gets a little irritating, but in all, it can be understood that they are from the age, and are common from the time. Though it is a story that involves Achilles, Achilles isn't really a main character in a normal sense. He sets things in motion at the beginning, but then he does nothing for most of the book. It defeats the idea that a main character being the driving force of the book. In all, he gets his girl friend taken from him by a king, so he curses the Greeks to suffer during the Trojan war, then he mops around for three hundred pages, then his best friend dies at the hands of Hector, a character we have spent much more time on then Achilles, so Achilles goes on a murderous spree across the field in front of Ileum, kills hundreds, and then kills Hector. Our hero, ladies and gentlemen! In fact, very few characters are even possible to connect to. Not only is it that our time periods and our morals so different that they make this impossible, its also that it seems that each character is just a shell, a plaything for the writer to use. Which gets the job done. Not only is Homer telling a story of the Trojan war, but also a parable about how you must reap what you sow. They are not characters, instead they are examples. Granted, this is wild speculation. It could just as easily be that Homer meant for all this to be taken literally, and this is just what people admired in the time of the Greeks. From my interpretation, though, I view them instead of an example of what is wrong, not as characters, but as playthings. In the end, the Iliad is still a strong book, but shows its age. But what it speaks about, the acceptance of ones mortality and ones own actions still ring true in the modern day. It is a book to read, as it does go into deep philosophical ideas, but is not the greatest, or the most interesting book, but still represents the some of the first examples of Western literature.

2022-11-14 13:51