Telemachus was the son of Odysseus, a son left behind when his father went away to the Trojan War. Odysseus would be gone for thirty years, and his time away from home can be divided into thirds--for the first ten years, he was fighting the Trojan War; he was lost on the way home and spent ten years on an island, despairing of ever returning home; and finally he spends ten years making his way back once he is released from this form of bondage. Telemachus grows to manhood without a father, and during that time he must face the need to protect his mother from the rapacious suitors who are after what would be Telemachus's inheritance. In the course of the poem The Odyssey by Homer, Telemachus grows up, beginning as a callow youth who wants only for his father to return to save himself and his mother to a man who can stand beside his father and fight those suitors who have, literally, eaten them out of house and home. This analysis will suggest a Freudian interpretation of the development of Telemachus, the meaning of that development, and the relationship between the boy and his mother and father.
The Greek story of the siege of Troy and of the warriors on both sides who fought over Helen resulted in a number of major literary works following one warrior or another either through the battle or through the aftermath of the war. Homer told the story of Troy in detail in The Iliad, and he then followed the character of Odysseus on the twenty years of wanderings to which he was subjected in trying to get home after the war in The Odyssey. Odysseus in The Iliad is presented as the shrewdest of the Greeks as well as a great warrior. It is Odysseus who devises the gift of the Trojan Horse, the action which leads to the fall of Troy. At the beginning of The Odyssey, he is found imprisoned on Calypso's island ten years after the end of that war. When we meet him in this epic poem, he is a man in such despair at his fate that he has ...