• causality
• problem and resolution
• elements that have no consequence
• turning points and transitions
• recognitions

• The Odyssey has a bit of a complex structure:
• It starts with Odysseus, on Calypso's island, so we know where he is, for a few lines
  
• But then, almost immediately, a divine council: Poseidon is away in Ethiopia (curious about Greece and Africa? look at https://chs.harvard.edu/chapter/1-early-greek-contact-with-africa/)
  
• Athena and Zeus decide Odysseus can now return home
• Remember that at the end of the war, Athena was not happy with the Achaians (see Odyssey 1.327)
  
• the 10 year gap between the war and now might serve to make it plausible that she's good with Odysseus now
  
• THEN, PIVOT, Athena goes down to Ithaka and rouses Odysseus' son Telemachus?
• What about Odysseus?

5th c. BCE vase from Chiusi archaeological museum: https://www.akg-images.co.uk/archive/-2UMDHUQ85I9Q.html

• The Telemachy takes 4 books!
• Many think it was "originally" a separate song.
• But R. Lattimore urges us to consider what putting the Telemachy right at the start gets us:
• Favorite characters like Nestor, Agamemnon, Menelaus, get to be brought in
• Parallels for Odysseus' return and many other elements, when we eventually get back to Odysseus' narrative
  
• Backstory naturally told (later on, Odysseus' stay on Phaeacia also serves this end).
• In a way, Telemachus IS Odysseus: as the male son, he will be the "new Odysseus" in the house of Odysseus.
  
• Also, the suitors back on Ithaca are made into a huge problem: conflict
• They want to kill Telemachus!
• They are painted as pretty much greedy ne'erdowells w/no intention of reciprocating all the feasting they enjoy at the expense of Odysseus/Telemachus' estate.
  
• That serves to drive the plot, and justifies (??) killing them all at the end.

That little justification of the Telemachy's place in Odyssey could be read as part of the creation of a plot (a complication, a resolution, a "story" with obvious beginning, middle, end), all via the device of Athena, who seems to drive the whole thing (watch her in this epic!).

So, in terms of important concepts of plot and story, we have:

• The traditional "plot" which involves the exposition of a situation or problem, a complication, and a resolution.
• That provides three things: a beginning, a middle, and an end, each of which is readily identifiable as such.
• But there is also "plot" as causal structure: what causes what to happen as its effect.
  
• And there is also the order of exposition: in Odyssey, for instance, we have first a bit about Odysseus, then a divine assembly, then a shift to Ithaca and Telemachus, then...
• this order of exposition need not be chronological: think of Odysseus' telling the tale of his wanderings to the Phaeacians as a flashback..
• Thus we also have the chronological sequence of events.

All of these elements are part of the artifice and effect of an author or singer. Instead of thinking of "plot" as one singular thing, for now let's keep these descriptive names clear in our mind, ones like "chronological sequence of events" and "order of exposition" and "causal structure" and "beginning, middle, end structure" because then we won't be as confused as if we think "plot" means one of them or "story" means one of them. But as you continue in literary analysis, you will find that people use terms with different definitions. Not just literary analysis.

There is also something called "functional equivalent" that helps us to analyze literature. The rage of Achilles seems to serve the same role in Iliad as the problem of the suitors in the Odyssey: it creates a unity, and it gives the story an obvious starting and ending point in time. "Homer" chooses exactly where to plop us down in medias res on the timeline by choosing the rage of Achilles and the problem of the suitors: a way of making the narrative more interesting/suspenseful/artistic.

The structure and tension and direction are all the product of artifice. Perhaps "Homer" was the artificer: perhaps that is why his name is attached to these 2 epics which are part of a much bigger set of epics, whose "authors" are a whole community. But we don't know that: we do know that these two epics stand out from the epic cycle b/c they are complex works with all the elements we just identified.

Was it one author? Maybe. Who knows. Note that Odyssey tells bits about the war, but almost never does it retell something in the Iliad: it tells about the horse, about Odysseus' spying mission into Troy, etc., but does not repeat episodes from Iliad. What could account for that? Maybe over time, the two epics sorted things out and settled into a non-overlapping pattern? Or, maybe, one bard decided what to cover in both and purposely didn't overlap? Or, maybe, one tradition is younger than the other and just naturally didn't overlap the older one, but told other things.

But trying to tie authorship by "Homer" to this is a distraction: the point is that both Iliad and Odyssey have plot by choosing a problem in a much larger story (one chooses Achilles' rage, the other the problem of the suitors): they weave the rest of the story into that plot, but they are not telling the rest of the story straightforwardly.

The most remembered part of Odyssey: his fantastic wanderings

Roman wall painting from a house in Rome on the Esquiline hill, interpreted as Odysseus' ships v. the Laestrygonians
https://blog.oup.com/2014/07/scenes-from-the-odyssey-in-ancient-art/

The "great wanderings" of Odysseus are ONLY in Books 9-12 (from when he blinds the Cyclops and gets Poseidon angry at him until he lands on Phaeacia). Those wanderings:

• 1) hardly have a role for gods,
  
• 2) are located on fantastic places, not known geographical places, and
  
• 3) are narrated by Odysseus himself, not the unnamed narrator.
  

These fantastic places where cyclops live, or where lotus-eaters live, or where Scylla and Charybdis catch sailors, or where Circe lives, or where Calypso lives: are they imaginary? or are they real? There are champions of both views.

Some people want to locate those fantastic places in the real places that in later ages claimed to be those sites (we know that they did from much later writers). There is a problem with their claims: all the places identified as the fantastic places in the Odyssey had Greek colonies that either were founded in the late 8th century (i.e. well after we think the Odyssey took shape) or their habitation dates back to Mycenaean times (i.e. they were Greek places already). In other words, they were known real places already at the time of writing down the epics (late 8th century). How could they both be known places with real Greeks AND fantastical/wild? It's not impossible to reconcile them: Homer is after all talking about a distant past. Perhaps the problem can be avoided with the hand-waving of saying that it's just a mash-up of history that doesn't quite match what we know from what we moderns find on the ground via archaeology and what the ancients knew at various times.
  This is all rendered more complex by the fact that the epics themselves speak of just about all of those real places that later came to be identified with the fantastical places, and they speak of them as real places with their real names! More mash-up? just inconsistency? or evidence that they are just imaginary, not meant to be real at all?

Even the land of the dead is not described as in an under-world, I think: it is just a far shore. So is it real? Some of you found a river/spring on the Peloponnese that is supposedly the Styx!

Another tack: Many have seen the wanderings as allegorical of human life. Maybe. Certainly works for later readers.

They certainly represent trials, trials of sheer perseverance and strength and skill, but also trials of temptation. They show Odysseus' physical strength, his ingenuity, his sheer willpower. Perhaps they are allegorical of the Human condition. They fulfill the first line of the poem.

But Lattimore, a famous translator of Homer, in his introduction, tells us that such allegorical reading is not at all likely to have been the bards' intent: it is a use that later ages put the stories to. Which is true: they did: but what backs up Lattimore's claim that earlier ages didn't allegorize it? Perhaps just the fact that we have nothing like clearly labeled/identifiable allegory from that age. And also, Odysseus seems to be one particular individual, not terribly allegorizable as "any human."

https://heliconstorytelling.com/homer-storytelling/

AND YET, let's try another tack: when Nestor tells a tale, it has a purpose, the very telling has a purpose. He uses the tale to say something to someone else. Ditto for Phoenix telling the tale of the Calydonian boar hunt. These tales within the narrative magnify the wisdom and experience of their tellers and also offer parallels and commentary on what is happening at the time in the narrative.

Maybe Odysseus' tales have a purpose too. Maybe his telling tales of his wanderings and trials are all designed for a purpose, a rhetorical one that suits the occasion and advances toward the storyteller's goal, strengthens their case. Like those people in Star Trek who only communicate thru stories? Self-justification? To get his audience (Phaeacians, etc.) to give him what he wants? His stories do accomplish that.

Odysseus also, separately from the great wanderings that he tells in Books 9-12, tells 5 clearly false stories that are meant to be plausible and are not fantastical, in answer to the "Who are you? and where from?" question. They involve known geographical places. They fit in with the other heroes' returns from Troy. They could relate historical reality (in the way that Homer does: a mashup of history and mythology which poet and audience believe really happened that way).

This is a really complex narrative space and the construction of place and plot and character is not accidental, not just a chronicler telling episodes one after another that have little unity.