The Blurred Line Between Reality & Myth
The second chapter of Derek Walcott’s Omeros introduces a number of key characters. It positions these characters within the world encompassed by the island of St. Lucia, the sea, and Nature itself. The chapter also serves as a link to Walcott’s homage to the work of Homer, the poem Omeros. The figure of Omeros recurs in several different guises, appearing in many place and in the form of many different characters. These characters symbolically represent the home of the human spirit. This essay will explore the themes of Omeros encompassed in Chapter II.
The reader is introduced to the characters Hector, Theophile, Placide, Pancreas, Philoctete, and others as the chapter begins. Philoctete is depicted as a man who has a sore which gives off an unpleasant odor. This causes him enormous pain which he can only assuage through imbibing rum. The delicacy of human relationships is affirmed by the fact that Philoctete’s shipmates express a lack of empathy or sympathy for his condition. He suffers alone in silence.
Walcott then introduces Seven Seas, a man who “envied the pirogues already miles out at sea,” (11). This character is depicted as intimately connected to Nature. His connected is through his senses; he sees with his ears and his body warms to the rising sun along with the rooftops of houses. He is blind and interacts with the world through his other senses that have become sharper and more acute as his vision has receded.
Seven Seas is liked to Homer’s Cyclops, “whose blind eye shut from the sunlight,” (13). Seven Seas has egg-white eyes, but his vision of the world in which he lives and its connection to the departed world of the Greek poet, Homer, is nevertheless intact. Though he is a “black fisherman,” he has a visceral connection to the sailors who move through the Greek world of Homer. This may very well be the connection
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