The Psychology of Great Characters: A Comprehensive Analysis of Literary Icons - Sykalo Evgen 2023

Odysseus - “The Odyssey” by Homer

Odysseus Is Kind of a Liar: A Messy Love Letter to the OG Literary Schemer

Okay. Let’s start with this: Odysseus is not a hero. Or he is, but like, in the way that your ex who ghosted you and then wrote you a five-paragraph apology that somehow made you feel bad for him is a “hero.” This man is complicated. And exhausting. And a little bit brilliant. He is also, unequivocally, one of the most psychologically magnetic characters in all of literature. That’s not a hot take, exactly. But the way we’ve been taught to handle him—with reverence, with distance, with marble-statue seriousness—is honestly kind of sad.

Because what if Odysseus is less a blueprint of masculinity and more a walking anxiety dream? What if The Odyssey isn’t a story of homecoming, but of post-traumatic storytelling addiction? What if Odysseus isn’t a symbol of cunning intelligence, but the literary equivalent of someone mainlining narrative control to keep his PTSD from eating him alive?

Let’s dive in. Let’s flail. Let’s psychoanalyze a guy who really, really needs therapy and probably invented gaslighting.

The Man Who Lied Too Much (And Kinda Liked It)

There’s this moment—early on, so fast you could miss it—where Odysseus is chilling on Calypso’s island. Naked. Crying on the beach. For seven years. This isn’t some Alpha Chad doing push-ups until Zeus calls him home. No, this is a man unraveling. A man who watched his friends get eaten, turned into pigs, drowned, crushed, and bewitched—and now he’s stranded on an island with a literal immortal sex goddess, and all he wants is his wife.

But does he leave when he has the chance? Not immediately. He waits. Plays it cool. Because here’s the thing: Odysseus never does anything straightforward. He makes even leaving an island a performance. That’s the psychology here: control through narrative. Nothing terrifies this man more than being at the mercy of someone else’s story.

He lies constantly. To gods. To friends. To strangers. He even lies in his own home, spinning an elaborate fake identity before revealing himself to Penelope. Like, bro. Just say hi.

And these aren’t white lies. These are identity-shifting, reality-bending, warping-the-world-to-fit-his-drama kind of lies. He doesn’t just survive. He curates his survival. He survives in style. This isn’t survival for its own sake—it’s survival plus myth.

In modern terms, Odysseus would be the guy who survives a horrible car crash, then writes a Medium essay titled “What My Near-Death Experience Taught Me About Product-Market Fit.” Weaponized trauma with a narrative arc.

We Don't Talk Enough About His Guilt (Because He Doesn’t)

Let’s be real: Odysseus has enough guilt to fill several therapy journals, but he never directly sits with it. Every time someone dies on his watch (which is often), he redirects. He reframes. Sometimes he even blames the dead (I’m looking at you, Elpenor). And when he visits the Underworld? It's basically a guilt-tour-masquerading-as-a-recon-mission. He cries. He rages. He sees his mom. But he never, ever admits fault.

Why?

Because admitting fault means relinquishing narrative power. And Odysseus? He’s addicted to authorship. He’s the unreliable narrator’s wet dream.

There’s something very 21st-century about that. This desperate need to make pain legible—beautiful even. Trauma, but make it aesthetic. Grief, but controlled. You can almost see him Instagram-captioning a blood-stained spear: “What doesn’t kill you leaves you more legendary.”

Home Is a Battlefield (But Softer, Trickier)

The thing no one tells you about The Odyssey—like, really tells you—is that the real war isn’t Troy. It’s Ithaca. It’s the domestic. It’s Penelope.

You want to understand the psychology of Odysseus? Watch him try to come home.

Coming home isn’t victory. It’s exposure. There’s nothing more vulnerable than being known. And what’s Penelope if not the ultimate mirror? She’s been weaving and unweaving her grief for twenty years. Her whole body is a resistance to closure. She knows he’s alive (in that mythic, pre-rational way), but she refuses to let it finalize until he earns it.

So what does Odysseus do? He tests her. Like, repeatedly. He disguises himself. He plays mind games. He puts her through layers of doubt just to confirm that she’s still his. It’s both kind of gross and weirdly moving. Because under the deception, under the control-freak energy, there’s a question vibrating at the center of him: Do you still love the person I became?

This is what makes Odysseus feel psychotically real. He’s not scared of monsters—he’s scared of being seen after being broken.

Odysseus Is the First Dude to Invent Main Character Energy

Every generation thinks it invented irony, but Odysseus is irony. He is both the story and the storyteller. A legend and a guy telling you why the legend totally went down like that (not like those haters said). He constantly breaks the fourth wall. Not literally, but functionally. He’s always aware of audience.

When he meets the Phaeacians, he doesn’t just ask for help. He performs his suffering. He mythologizes it, packages it in clean, emotionally manipulative beats. It’s like watching someone workshop their trauma story live at a storytelling night—except the stakes are whether or not they’ll get a ride home.

And people eat it up. They always do. Because Odysseus knows what we love. We love survivors. We love cleverness. We love when suffering comes in a well-timed arc.

I mean, what is The Odyssey if not the original “based on a true story” limited series?

The Real Sirens Are the Stories We Tell Ourselves

This part might be my favorite. The sirens. The iconic scene. Odysseus ties himself to the mast to hear their song and not die from it. It's such a flex. But also—insanely vulnerable.

He wants to hear them. Not out of masochism, but because he needs to feel that temptation and survive it. This is peak self-aware myth-making. He doesn’t just want to be a man who lived—he wants to be a man who knew the dangers of knowing and chose it anyway.

The psychology here is lowkey terrifying. This is someone who doesn’t trust the boundaries of the world unless he’s tested them himself. He doesn’t believe in safety unless he’s flirted with ruin.

And isn’t that kind of... us? Every time we scroll the chaos of the internet, play chicken with burnout, or fall in love with someone we know will hurt us—we’re tying ourselves to the mast. Hoping that the thrill will be worth it. That we’ll emerge with the story intact.

Odysseus as Proto-Internet Brain

You could argue that Odysseus has the most online brain of all time. He’s constantly pivoting identities. Constantly curating. He has a Finsta for every situation. “Oh, you’re a Cyclops? I’m Nobody.” “Oh, you’re a grieving king? I’m a broken stranger who just washed up on your shore, NBD.”

It’s all performance. But not fake. Just... strategic. And that’s where it gets sticky. Because when does performance become delusion? When does narrative overwrite reality?

If you zoom out, Odysseus doesn’t just tell lies—he lives them, until they become true. He is, in essence, the human embodiment of myth-making. And isn’t that what we do now? Turn ourselves into stories? Tweak our timelines to be more bearable, more coherent, more survivable?

Odysseus isn’t just relatable. He’s prophetic. He saw the way selfhood would fracture and shift in the age of endless narrative. He just did it with sandals and sea monsters.

The Odyssean Psyche Is a House of Mirrors

Ultimately, Odysseus is a shape-shifter not because he wants to be, but because the world demands it. His psychology isn’t just cunning. It’s reactive. Adaptive. Built from trauma and crowned with charisma.

He is a survivor, yes—but not the stoic kind. He’s the kind who makes meaning out of rubble. Who grieves sideways. Who tells the story over and over, until he believes it. He is a case study in the myth of the self-made man, except his “self” is a flickering, ever-evolving hallucination.

And maybe that’s why he lasts. Why his story still bites. Because deep down, we’re all a little Odyssean. Not heroic. Just desperate. Not noble. Just narrating.

There’s no clean takeaway here. No moral of the story. Just a man, washed up, trying to piece himself together through the stories he tells. And hoping someone’s still listening.