The Odyssey, written in the eighth century BCE, is one of the two main epic poems of Homer. Homer’s writing talent inspires others to create adaptations of the Odyssey. Two examples are: Zachary Mason’s novel, The Lost Books of the Odyssey, and the Cohen Brothers’ film “O Brother, Where Art Thou?.” The scene about the Sirens is a very famous section of both the novel and the film. The novel describes the storyline with vivid details, and the film does the same, but with a different storyline.
The scene of the Sirens in the film starts off when the three main characters, Everett, Pete, and Delmar drives along a road with their stolen vehicle, which they have stolen from the previous scene. Pete starts to make such a horrendous noise and yells …show more content…
The novel describes the Sirens to have green eyes, and unlike the film with three Sirens, there’s only two of them in the novel. As the Sirens sing, Odysseus remembers about some parts of his past, from him murdering a man, to the first time Penelope leaving in a white courtyard in Sparta, to the day he’s left Ithica, and how far he is from home. The singing of the Sirens led up to them calling upon him. The Sirens knew of Odysseus’s hardship and offered him release from his displacement, which is a trap to killing Odysseus. Odysseus knows better, and within time, the Sirens gives up singing, and stops. In the beginning of the chapter, the narrator starts off with, “Circe had told me the sirens’ song was irresistible, the very shape of desire, and that no one that heard it went unscathed, as was attested by the bones of their admirers tumbling back and forth in the tide-pools around their reef.” This can be backed up by what happens later with Oddyseus when the singing ends, and as his men starts to take their ship away from the area of the Sirens, he cries out for the Sirens to continue. The Sirens didn’t continue and Odysseus’s men all start sailing away with Oddyseus. Odysseus orders the men to turn back, however, they disobey, so Odysseus starts cursing at them, “I cursed them, called them disobedient dogs whose lot was to obey, not to question.” After Odysseus says this, all of the men contributed to going back to the Sirens. Once they went back, the Sirens showed disinterest Of Odysseus’s begging, and goes to sleep on their “beds of twisted black basalt.” The men realized that it is time to go, and they start to leave. Odysseus, seemingly depressed, goes and sits down in the back of the ship as he watches over the moonlit sea as he thinks about the