The lost books of the Odyssey gave a very different look on the stories that were told in Homers Iliad. It’s a very clear view on how different people will take pieces of a puzzle without a picture and turn it into their own. Like the word poems where you can follow whatever line you choose, and the end result is something different than what another person may read when they look at the poem. It also changes the way that we look at Odysseus because in Homers version he is the war hero, and you see that in the way he is written. But Mason writes him more as what I consider an unreliable narrator of what happened and why he made the choices that he did. Personally, I enjoy more where the character is an unreliable narrator because it makes you almost question the choices that were made and if they were really the right ones rather than essentially being told that the war hero made the best choice for himself and those around him. It also humanizes the characters in a different way because while you are still viewing the character through someone else’s perspective there is a bit of wiggle room in how the character is to you. We also get to see Polyphemus as more than just a big dumb brute but as someone who was trying to be polite in not asking questions about someone’s name. We also saw him as areal being and it describes the pain and the way he felt when he realized he would never see again after sitting down with the crew. This is again a different way to view a character, one who was just big and mean in one story but in another he was just someone living alone who was too big and too strong for his own good and then tried to be hospitable only to then be blinded but what we are told is the best choice by the hero.
