Charles Underwood focuses on mythos and voice in the Odyssey to illuminate the characters' journeys from social displacement through discovery and recovery. He explores how the epic narrative illustrates an ancient tradition's understanding of how one learns to make one's way as an active agent in an uncertain world.

The Odyssey is an ancient Greek epic about the challenges and hardships Odysseus faces in his rambling ten-year journey homeward after the Trojan War and in the days following his arrival on the island of Ithaka, his homeland. Depicting his own and others’ social displacement after the war, and describing his successive challenges against human, natural and supernatural adversaries, the epic dramatizes his problematic process of healing from the trauma of war and his slow, arduous attempt to recover a sense of personal identity among his people, his wife, his son, and others who have longed...