Key Aspects of the Character of Achilles - Assignment Example

 Homer’s Iliad: Achilles Table of Contents I. Introduction 3 II. Exploring Achilles’ Existential Crisis 3 III. The Nature of Achilles’ Relationships with Other Warriors and Gods 5 IV. Achilles’ Realizations Away from Battle 6 V. Discussing Achilles as Literature’s First Real/True Individual, First Problem Character in the West 7 VI. Achilles’ Behavior – Responses by Readers. What Repels and Keeps Sympathies Towards Achilles 9 Works Cited 10 I. Introduction This paper explores Achilles’ character in Homer’s ‘Iliad’, focusing on some key aspects that include the nature of his existential crisis, as well as the reasons why his relationships with other warriors as well as with the gods were marked as special and non-usual. The exploration also covers his realizations when he withdrew from battle; the import of the assertion that Achilles is the first true/real individual, and the first “Problem Character” in the history of the literature of the west; reader responses/reactions to Achilles behavior, relating to the ways that his actions maintain/regain or repel the sympathies of the reader. This latter aspect is explored in the context of some relevant parts of the work, chiefly in the way Achilles deals with Hector, in the behaviors that Achilles displays towards Hector, and in Achilles’ actuations towards Priam, relating to his last meeting with the latter (Homer). II. Exploring Achilles’ Existential Crisis The existential crisis of Achilles revolves around the role that destiny plays in the lives of men, and the role that choice plays too, in the shaping of the lives of men such as Achilles. On the one hand, fate seems to conspire to put him in a position where he would fight. He had unequalled skills and competence as a warrior, and is in fact feared by the Trojans. These skills and temperaments as a warrior, the superior physical endowments, all had the stamp of fate in it. All of his men, as well as Agamemnon, further buttress this state of affairs, by pleading with Achilles for the warrior to fight and to fulfill the destiny of the Greeks of overpowering Troy. On the other hand, as far as Achilles is concerned, the more desirable choice is to go back home, and to live a long life, obscure to be sure, but one where he is spared the fate of the warrior who dies in battle, and for what? This is the essence of the existential dilemma as Achilles saw it, that if he were to stay he would reap glory and an immortal reputation, but at the cost of him dying in battle. On the other hand, to go home, while entailing turning one’s back on all that fortune, fame and the adulation of the men around him, would mean living a long and idle life. Achilles laments that his work seems not to bring him to a place that is any better than the one who idles away his days. Achilles notes that for the idling man and for the warrior who works and pushes hard to get to some goal, the fate is the same, and that both die. Why not just turn his back on everything, head back home, and life a long and useless life? (Homer) Digging deeper, the existential crisis is really a kind of question to the fates and to the gods, of Achilles gaining some kind of self-awareness about his role in the unfolding events. On the one hand, the fate seems to be that he should fight and be the warrior to fight and kill Hector. On the other hand something in him wants to challenge the fates. Is life really so predetermined that one cannot help but play the part that is allotted to him, regardless of his own preferences and wants? A part of him wants to be back home, making a career out of living a long life. On the other hand, one can also say that one does not know the consequences of running away from the roles that destiny prods people to play. Everything about his circumstances, from his superior warrior skills to the pleading of his compatriots and to the situation that they found themselves in, in a precarious condition relative to the Trojans, cried that Achilles’ lot in life was to fight, and to use all of his warrior endowments not to go home and rot away but to use them in that battle arena. And yet, Achilles wanted to dream, and to challenge all that. This is the existential dilemma from a deeper vantage point, factoring in the fates, and destiny, and what it meant to Achilles (Homer). III. The Nature of Achilles’ Relationships with Other Warriors and Gods We get from the play that the warriors saw Achilles as a kind of hero and an indispensable part of the war effort. The gods seemed to favor Achilles too, and the Greeks in general. He is a commander in his own right, and in the way that the Greek soldiers under him regarded him, with a large measure of hero worship and awe, we see that Achilles’ relationship with his fellow Greeks is one where he is regarded as being a cut above all of them. It is noteworthy that in the midst of a very trying time in their campaign, with Hector and the Trojans being able to push the Greeks back and being able to seriously impair their fighting abilities with the capture of a ship, that Agamemnon even tried to woo Achilles back with promises of wealth. Agamemnon likewise saw Achilles as a kind of savior and a super warrior without whom the war effort against the Trojans would not prosper. They were on the brink of collapse and they needed to look up to Achilles to save the entire Greek army from that collapse. As far as the relationship of Achilles with the gods are concerned, on the other hand, that Zeus, god of gods, sided with the Trojans on the request of his mother Thetis, during the break in the war, and with Achilles extremely offended by Agamemnon’s wanting to get Briseis back from the hero, is an indication of the favor that Achilles has with the gods. He is special from the point of view of his fellow soldiers and Agamemnon, and he is special from the point of view of the gods too (Homer). IV. Achilles’ Realizations Away from Battle Achilles’ realizations away from battle center around his fate, and what it means for a warrior to forego that life and to go back home, what the implications of that return to his home in Greece are. He had lived a ruthless warrior’s life, always in the midst of fighting that could end his life at any time, and as his mother warned, he could die in battle, whereas he could also return and live long. His thoughts surfaced in reaction to Agamemnon’s offer of riches and spoils, women, and including the offer of marriage to one of his daughters, in exchange for fighting the Trojans and rescuing the Greeks from what seemed, at that point to be imminent defeat and death at the hands of Hector and his men. The only thing that separated the Greeks and the Trojans at that point was night time. In the day the attack was sure to come. Yet away from all this Achilles’ thoughts and musings were about this dilemma of wanting a different kind of life from the warrior life that he had been thrust into. Surely he was very good at it, and the spoils from his previous conquests as well as the pleadings of the men around him and of the desperate Agamemnon also point to everyone acknowledging that they needed Achilles to win the war. At the same time, one can see from Achilles’ thoughts that he was not merely playing hard to get, so to speak, but was speaking from a sincere core, and he was truly ambivalent about the entire war effort, spurning everything that was offered to him, and saying out loud what the warrior’s work meant in a universe where the bum and the earnest warrior in the end both succumb to death (Homer). V. Discussing Achilles as Literature’s First Real/True Individual, First Problem Character in the West There are many ways to view Achilles as a real flesh and blood person, as opposed to someone who merely plays a role, is devoid of subjective thoughts and feelings, and the like. One is to see that in many ways a true individual is also a flawed individual, and in this sense one can read Achilles’ thoughts and actions as certainly constituting the actions of a real, flawed, flesh and blood person. For instance, he was willing to let the whole Greek army come to ruin, by refusing to fight, and wishing the entire army and Agamemnon fail moreover. This is all because he perceived that Agamemnon slighted his pride and his honor by wanting to take Briseis away from him. One can say that only a flawed individual would take things so personally, all because of a girl, when the lives of the entire contingent rested on his hands. His pride stood in the way of him arguably being able to make a more level-headed assessment of what his actions brought. It brought ruin to an army that had depended on him to lead the fight. At the same time one is able to catch a glimpse of how this entirely subjective and flawed quality in Achilles adds a very human dimension to the hero. He is capable of very human emotions, and very negative emotions of spite and hatred too. He is capable of losing perspective, and of hoping moreover for Agamemnon’s entire war effort to utterly crumble, to the point where he actively sought the help of his mother Thetis to petition Zeus to intervene and to act on the side of the Trojans against Agamemnon (Homer). Elsewhere the reader also catches various glimpses of the unique personality traits of Achilles, such as his fascination with swords, and his strong and very subjective feelings towards his companion Patroclus. These are detailed sketches that make Achilles further stand out as a true individual, not previously present in western literature, and which delineated Achilles as standing apart from the less than human characterizations of past heroes, who showed neither flaws in reason, nor strong emotions and flawed judgments that are clouded by subjective feelings and realizations. In ‘The Iliad’ one can see that Homer brought a large measure of humanity in characterizing Achilles, and made sure too that Achilles very human follies and flaws contributed in a major way in the development of the story, in the same way that subjective human personality traits , emotions and thoughts shape the real world and shape decisions and lives too (Homer). Finally, it is along the same line of thinking that one can imagine Achilles as being the first problem character in the literature of the west. His complexity is problematic, and his flaws were a deep source of misery and suffering not only to his fellow soldiers but also to Achilles himself. One can see that all that bloodshed, and even the death of Patroclus, would not have occurred if only Achilles saw things from a more comprehensive point of view, and if he only was able to set aside his personal feelings of being essentially disrespected and slighted, for the good of the Greek war effort. His pride stood in the way, and even when he did decide to fight, it was for very subjective emotional reasons, and that is to avenge the death of his dear companion. When he insisted for instance on dragging the dead remains of Hector for several days, and on sacrificing the lives of many Trojans to honor his beloved dead friend, we see just how driven by personal feelings and passion Achilles is. In a way it is a kind of self-obsession with one’s feelings pushed to an extreme, that propelled Achilles to do what he did in the wake of Patroclus’ death. In Achilles literature had its first taste of the deeply emotional and self-centered hero more concerned about his inner turmoil and his sense of pride and honor than the outcome of any war, and the lives of his fellow soldiers (Homer). VI. Achilles’ Behavior – Responses by Readers. What Repels and Keeps Sympathies Towards Achilles There is something mad and inhuman about the way Achilles dragged Hector’s body for days and days, grieving over the death of his friend Patroclus and wanting to dwell on that grief and that sense of loss and outrage. An ordinary person would arguably stop after a day or two, but Achilles went on for days and days doing so. An average reader is understandably repelled by all this. There is something overkill about what he did, a part of his grief that is almost scary. Revenge is one thing, but the intensity of his feelings was unusual, and the image of the crazed Achilles dragging Hector’s mutilated body for days and days, past the point where it was humanly decent and normal to do so, is truly repelling. One can make the same statement when Achilles prayed for the Greeks to actually lose and to suffer, because Agamemnon had wanted to take back Briseis from him. It was arguably not that act alone, but what it implied for Achilles, namely the slight to his sense of honor and pride, that made him hate Agamemnon so much. By refusing to fight, and more so by asking that the gods actually help the enemy, Achilles was being truly repugnant for the average reader. On the other hand, when Achilles surrendered Hector’s body to Priam, he was being human and magnanimous, and the reader sees that after all his madness had an end, and that he was probably returning to his more human senses at that point. That allowed the average reader to sympathize and relate again somewhat to the more humane Achilles (Homer). Works Cited Homer. “The Iliad”. MIT The Internet Classics Archive. 800 BCE. Web. 16 April 2014. Read More