The Odyssey

Most studies of the Odyssey's narrative structure have focused on limited patterns in individual books of the epic or in sequences within books. In this work, Bruce Louden uncovers an extended narrative pattern that runs throughout the whole Odyssey. Looking at such elements as characters' names, challenges faced by Odysseus, the structure of the proem (the poem's first ten lines), and roles assigned to the poem's female characters, he identifies a large sequence of successive motifs, repeated in full three times in the Odyssey, which provides the underlying skeletal structure for nearly all the poem's plot.