Tales of Epic Heroes: Supernatural Season One vs. The Odyssey

ByRandal
The Odyssey in a Bottle (‘Til the Bottle Gets Busted in a Car Wreck Blues)
 

Well I roam from town to town, I go through life without a care,
And I’m as happy as a clown,
With my two fists of iron, but I’m goin’ nowhere.
  – Dion, The Wanderer

Happy as a clown? Boy, does that sound out of place. Try this instead.

He who has tried it knows
how cruel is
sorrow as a companion
to the one who has few
beloved friends:
the path of exile holds him,
not at all twisted gold,
a frozen spirit,
not the bounty of the earth.

– The Wanderer, anonymous, Anglo-Saxon Exeter Book

That’s better. Ready to celebrate the singular thrill of turning in my wretched, poorly-penned research paper, I did what any conscientious partier would do: pour him or herself a nice glass of adult beverage and watch some Supernatural. Sticking with our recent old school theme, I decided to start with the pilot. And then my ever-churning geeky brain confirmed its long-held suspicion: John Winchester and his sons aren’t merely obvious examples of Der Wanderer, aren’t just experiencing the Quest, they’re living in an alternately thick-n-thinly veiled, (very) broadly narrated version of the greatest quest ever told.
 
The Greatest Story Ever Hulaed
 
Who hasn’t read Homer’s Odyssey? If you haven’t, seriously, fix that tragic loss right now. I’ll wait.
 
Back? Good. Eric Kripke and the other writers are pretty smart folks, and I can’t imagine that such archetypal imagery didn’t subconsciously bleed into their work, for they reflect integral threads of the human condition (conflict, love, family, home, death) that have remain unchanged over thousands of years. From the epic of Gilgamesh and Enkidu; Aeneas following his destiny after the fall of Troy; Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso; Cervantes’ Don Quixote; Captain Ahab forever searching for his white whale; the protagonist of Schubert’s moving song cycle Winterreise; Rabelais’ Pantagruel and Panurge (Sam and Dean? In some respects, yes!); numerous tales of the Old West such as the novels of Zane Grey; Kerouac’s On the Road; any number of blues songs, to television’s Kung Fu, the notion of the wanderer, of the quest is as old as civilization itself, and that’s what we watch every Thursday at 9 p.m.. “Road show” is merely the latest incarnation of this timeless framework.
Back water blues done caused me to pack my things and go,
’cause my house fell down, and I can’t live there no more.
– Bessie Smith, Back-Water Blues
 
Truer words never spoken, huh, sisters (and brothers)? The Winchesters certainly did have the tide of fate wash over them, as the gods are wont to do to mere mortals. The Winchesters entered their war, our war, on November 2, 1983. Their home as they knew it and expected it to forever be was gone, and now they have the dubious, difficult double task of keeping the ideal of home alive – for that’s all it is now, an internalization of exterior trappings and vice versa, a fragmented whole – while they drive with the vanguard shielding the abode of each and every one of us from what lurks in blackest pitch. So, about that joining of conflict and its consequences, that odyssey…
 
The Road So Far
 
“And as to stratagems, no man would claim
Odysseus’ gift for those. He had no rivals,
your father, at the tricks of war.”
 – Nestor to Telemachus, The Odyssey, book III
 
Credit fraud, fake IDs, hustling pool, all small fry compared to the epic drama played out on the slopes of Ilion and the town itself, thanks to the famous rogue’s wooden horse, right? Au contraire, for that was a mere regional conflict, whereas here, we’ve got the apocalypse looming ahead. Only we didn’t quite know it back in 2005. Score one, I guess, for Team Winchester, that most cursed of families.
 
“My distinguished father is lost,
who ruled among you once, mild as a father,
and there is now this greater evil still:
my home and all I have are being ruined.”
– Telemachus, The Odyssey, book I
 

“Dad’s on a hunting trip. And he hasn’t been home in a few days.”

 
The muse is singing, and through Sam and Dean Winchester the story is told. Right from the first scene of the first episode, we see a father’s love for his family lashed and burnt by tongues of flame. He’s already been through a war; he certainly wouldn’t have wanted to experience another. We know from a nonextant fragment of Cypria that Odysseus attempted to avoid joining the Achaeans against Troy by pretending to be mad. Palamedes exposed his antebellum ruse when, catching Odysseus sewing his fields not with seeds but with salt, he placed the infant son in front of the father’s plow, thereby prompting him to turn. Like John, his family was his number one concern, and their life would always take precedence over his. Thus, the Greek taught his son the ways of proper kingship, as John was to teach Sam and Dean the ways of hunting. 

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