Warning: this article contains spoilers for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey.

Ten years at Troy. Ten more lost at sea. When Odysseus finally reaches Ithaca – in Homer’s poem and again, played by Matt Damon in Christopher Nolan’s new film – he doesn’t walk through the door and say who he is. He lies. He invents a stranger’s life story. He tests his wife Penelope (played by Anne Hathaway), his father, even his old nurse before he lets any of them see him as himself. For a man who has spent 20 years trying to get home, he is remarkably reluctant to arrive.

That reluctance is usually read as suspense, or cunning, or simple survival instinct. But there’s a more unsettling possibility: that Odysseus cannot tell his own story because, on some level, he cannot yet bear to know it.

The comparison Nolan suggests between Odysseus and a returning veteran isn’t new. The psychiatrist Jonathan Shay built an entire body of work on it, arguing in Odysseus in America (2002) that Homer’s hero shows the same shattered trust, numbness and hypervigilance he observed in Vietnam veterans.

Countless essays since have asked some version of “did Odysseus have post-traumatic stress disorder?” It’s a fair question, but by now familiar enough to risk becoming reflex rather than insight.........

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