Why does 'The Odyssey' still resonate three millennia later?

Nearly 3,000 years after it was composed, Homer's The Odyssey continues to inspire readers, artists and filmmakers because it asks enduring questions: What does it mean to come home after years of absence? How do our experiences shape who we become? How do the stories we tell help us make sense of our lives?

As Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey arrives in theaters this summer, audiences will undoubtedly marvel at the legendary encounters with the Cyclops, the Sirens, and Scylla and Charybdis. Yet Homer's greatest innovation may not be the adventures themselves but the surprisingly modern way he tells the story.

As someone who teaches both literature and film, I'm especially interested in how students respond not only to the story itself but also to the way it is told. Nolan's filmography suggests that Homer was already experimenting with the nonlinear storytelling techniques that are a hallmark of some of cinema's greatest films. Citizen Kane (1941), Rashomon (1950), Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), and film noirs such as Mildred Pierce (1945) and Pulp Fiction (1994) show that the order in which a story is told often matters as much as the events themselves. Nolan's adaptation traces his signature nonlinear style back to one of storytelling's oldest sources.

Readers of The Odyssey will remember that the story famously begins in medias res—Latin for "in the middle of things." Rather than opening with the fall of Troy or even with the beginning of Odysseus's voyage home, the epic begins nearly 20 years after Odysseus departed for the Trojan War. Odysseus remains stranded on Calypso's island while, back in Ithaca, Penelope is besieged by suitors convinced her husband will never return. Long before Odysseus enters the narrative, readers experience the disorder of his absence. That absence becomes the engine of the whole poem, setting up its central concern: nostos, the Greek word for homecoming.

One reason the epic still feels surprisingly modern is that Homer transforms a series of adventures into a single story about coming home. Aristotle later explained why this works. In the Poetics, he argues that a story is unified not because it concerns one person but because its events form a meaningful whole. The Odyssey became one of Aristotle's clearest examples of narrative unity. Equally important to this unity are the poem's many scenes of recognition, or anagnorisis—from the dog Argos recognizing his long-lost master to Odysseus ultimately recognizing his own life as a story.

The poem also reflects on storytelling itself. After escaping Calypso, Odysseus reaches the court of the Phaeacians, where the blind bard Demodocus sings about the Trojan War. Odysseus, hearing his own life transformed into song, breaks down in tears. Only then does he reveal his identity and recount the famous adventures of the Cyclops, Circe, the Sirens, and the Underworld—not as events unfolding before us, but as memories reconstructed through his own narration.

The philosopher Hannah Arendt regarded this scene as paradigmatic for both history and storytelling. In Between Past and Future (1961), she turns to Odysseus listening to Demodocus's song to argue that experience becomes meaningful only when it can be narrated and shared. Only by telling his story does Odysseus come to understand his own life. His experiences become a coherent narrative through which he recognizes himself. Perhaps that is why the epic still resonates today. Whether we are returning from war, leaving home for college, changing careers, or rebuilding after personal loss, we often understand our own lives by learning to tell their stories.

So what should audiences watch for in Nolan's adaptation? Not simply the legendary adventures, but the remarkable way Homer arranges them into a story. Homer's greatest innovation may prove harder to visualize: his discovery that we often understand our lives only after we have learned to tell them as stories—and that those stories are rarely told in chronological order.

Michael Grafals is an associate teaching professor in the Department of English and the director of the film studies certificate program.