The poles of heroic renown and utter anonymity between which the hero moves throughout the epic, always simultaneously complicating and enriching our sense of who he is, are conflated at the end of the story. Here, Odysseus, finally returned to the land of which he is king, must nonetheless assume the disguise of a nameless beggar in order to infiltrate his own palace and test the loyalty of those nearest and dearest to him—wife, son, father, members of his household, none of whom know, at first, who he really is—as part of a canny plot to reclaim his true, royal identity.
These oscillations between apparently extremes of identity—"no one" or rock star? beggar or king? “stranger” or native? singer or song? unknown stranger or intimate family member?—help frame what are, perhaps, the poem’s most profound questions. How do we know who someone is? How do we know who we ourselves are? What is the difference between our inner and outer selves—between the “I” that remains constant as we make the journey from birth to death, and the self we present to the world, which we sometimes choose to alter but is sometimes changed by circumstances beyond our control? How is it we always feel we are “ourselves” even as we acknowledge that we evolve and change over time, both physically and emotionally? The latter paradox in particular lends urgency and an almost tragic poignancy to the climax of the romantic plot. When Odysseus seeks to reveal himself at last to Penelope, he has to prove that he is the same person who left twenty years earlier. But of course, no one can be the same person after twenty years of suffering. So just what is being “recognized” when those two come together again at last?
And so this work, famous for its exciting narrative of the hero’s adventures in exotic worlds and among strange creatures, is in fact preoccupied above all with the business of being a human being—an identity that turns out to be defined by relationships: between hosts and guests, strangers and intimates, foreigners and countrymen, mortals and immortals; between the idealized past and the troubled present, the dead and the living; between men and women, spouses and lovers, parents and children; relationships, finally, among the myriad and sometimes contradictory elements of our own natures. Readers who are attentive to this aspect of the epic will not be surprised when, at the end of the story, it becomes clear that the object of Odysseus’ many wanderings through time and space was not simply to reach Ithaka, or even to reach his son, his wife, and his father, but rather to be reintegrated into the entire web of relationships—emotional, familial, political—that define his homeland and, hence, define him.
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