Friday, December 11, 2015

What is Odysseus's trick for escaping from the cave in The Odyssey?

Odysseus's "trick" to getting out of the cave is to blind the Cyclops, Polyphemus, so that the monster can still move the heavy stone away from in front of the door but has a more difficult time trying to locate and catch the men.  Odysseus realizes that if he simply kills the Cyclops, he and his men will also perish inside the cave because there is no way they'll be able to move that stone. ...

Odysseus's "trick" to getting out of the cave is to blind the Cyclops, Polyphemus, so that the monster can still move the heavy stone away from in front of the door but has a more difficult time trying to locate and catch the men.  Odysseus realizes that if he simply kills the Cyclops, he and his men will also perish inside the cave because there is no way they'll be able to move that stone.  So, he gets Polyphemus very drunk and tells the monster that his name is "Nobody" (another pretty clever trick) and when he passes out, Odysseus and a handful of his crew plunge a large olive stake that they've sharpened and hardened in a fire into the monster's one eye.  Then, when the monster begins to scream and the other Cyclopes come to his aid, he shouts out that "Nobody is hurting [him]" and so they leave.  Then Odysseus and his men lash themselves to the undersides of sheep that they've tied together (another good trick!) so that when Polyphemus feels the animals' backs to be sure that the men aren't riding out on them, he cannot feel them because they are underneath the sheep.

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