Life Journey Of The Odyssey

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Life Journey of The Odyssey

The Odyssey is an epic story of one man’s journey as well as the trials and tribulations that he encounters while trying to make it back to his home. Along the way, this story not only follows the guidelines of many other hero stories, but also applies to our everyday struggles both internally and externally. It seems like everyone can look at a story from the odyssey and somehow relate it to a difficulty or a problem that they had to overcome to reach their goal of being happy. These heroic stories have been told throughout the years to help us learn lessons about ourselves and to learn how other people have been able to shine through the hard times to reach happiness. In the book Life Journey: Literature and the Search for Meaning in the Stages of Life by Milt Ford, the ways these books teach us these lessons are analyzed and explained using his theory. Mr. Ford explains that there are three experiences that make up a persons life, they are identity, relationships, and accomplishments. He goes even further as to apply each one of these experiences into stages of our life such as, childhood, adolescence, early adulthood, middle adulthood, and late adult. It in interesting to see how this theory not only applies to The Odyssey but to our lives as well.
In The Odyssey there is a young man by the name of Telemachus who is the prince of Ithaca, and the son of the books hero, Odysseus. Though he does not get very old in the book, he does go through some very important times in his life journey, discovering for himself whom he is and what he is made of. In the early stages of the book we see the birth of Telemachus and then hear of things going on at his home. As in Ford’s theory we know that during the identity experience of Telemachus’ childhood, he is experiencing himself. He begins to find out who he is as a child and that is when he begins to develop all of the traits that are going to follow hi...