Power Relations in Literature Power relations are featured in different ways

Power relations are featured in different ways in different literary works, and often how power is portrayed is dependent on the historical era from which the work emerges. Power is seen in stark terms in many works in which human beings act out power plays fueled by ambition, hatred, lust, and similar basic emotions. In ancient Greece, represented by The Odyssey, Homer shows human beings not only as power brokers in their own right but as pawns in power struggles among the gods. Jonathan Swift in Gulliver's Travels satirizes the operation of political power in his own era, while Machiavelli in The Prince suggests how political power should be taken, utilized, and maintained by the ruler.

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 given up even trying to get home. He is resigned to his fate until Athena comes to him and gives him back his courage, after which he is able to sail for home once more.

He will be the last of the Greeks to reach home. His failure to reach home before is attributable in part to his offending of Poseidon, the god of the sea, which occurs when he and his men are trapped in a cave by the Cy

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r moral interpretations or implications. He was accused of teaching evil precisely because he examined the world of man apart from the world of God, and also because he accepted immoral behavior from the Prince if that behavior promoted the interests of the state, while he rejected moral behavior on the part of the Prince if that behavior did not further the interests of the state. Machiavelli would point out that in The Prince, he is not creating a system as much as he is explaining the workings of the system that exists, and he is finding what elements there are in that system that must be included and that will determine how the Prince is to behave to be successful. The Prince does not create his own system of leadership, either, but rather applies the lessons of history and the mistakes and successes of other princes to the issue at hand. Of course, Machiavelli was basing his view very much on the leader he most admired, Cesare Borgia, and this fact colors much of what he writes in his treatise. Still, his method was to analyze what was true and to derive principles from it that would be applicable by the leader of any state. This was not a moral lesson or an ethical discussion but a political tract for getting things d

Category: Literature - P