“There Is Matter for Thought”

Abstract

All this, they argued, had to have been part of a single artistic vision that worked its way through the epic’s many themes and episodes.... Where some people see chaos and incoherence, others will find sense and symmetry and wholeness.... I talked about ring composition, that remarkable narrative technique that weaves the present and the past together, that allows the account of a specific episode in a character’s life to expand to encompass his entire life. Daniel Mendelsohn, An Odyssey: a Father, a Son, and an Epic, Alfred A. Knopf, 2017, p. 72.