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130 The first four chapters analyzed each of the major techniques for presenting speech in the Iliad and the Odyssey, with the goals of exploring the properties of each mode of speech presentation and finding out what contribution each technique makes to the narratives, and giving characters their due as presenters both of a significant proportion of speech overall and of the majority of all forms of speech presentation except direct quotation. The last two chapters apply the results of the first four chapters to the Odyssey (Chapter 5) and the Iliad (Chapter 6). They integrate the individual speech presentation techniques that were the focus of Chapters 1 through 4 into an overall speech presentation spectrum for each Homeric poem, once again comparing the main narrator and the characters, but as presenters of the full range of speech presentation techniques rather than as presenters of one particular technique. The Odyssey presents speech more consistently across multiple narrative levels than the Iliad does. This means that in some sense, the Iliad spans a wider range of approaches to speech presentation than the Odyssey, and so I have put it after the Odyssey in order to move from the speech presentation spectrum that covers the smallest set of options (the Odyssey) through increasingly broader spectrums in the last two sections of the book (the Iliad in Chapter 6, and the Homeric poems overall in the Conclusion). Speech presentation strategies in the Odyssey have basically the same effects across different narrative levels, and the proportions of most kinds of speech acts are similar at different narrative levels as well. At the same time, while a given speech presentation technique has more or less the same effect wherever it occurs, as we will see, different kinds of narrative contexts and different kinds of narrators draw more heavily on some parts of this spectrum than on others. Furthermore, a small amount of speech is presented in the Odyssey by third-level narrators; this will not be discussed in detail because there is no analogue for it in the Iliad, but the existence of chapter five SPEECH PRESENTATION in the ODYSSEY SPEECH PRESENTATION in the ODYSSEY 131 this level of narrative subordination—and the effort required for the audience to keep track of the narrative structure entailed by multiple layers of embedded speech—helps to make narrative an important theme in the Odyssey . While gender has not been a consistent focus of earlier chapters because the Iliad does not have enough prominent female characters to create a reliable body of data on how women’s speech is presented, the Odyssey includes a female mortal character who speaks often enough to provide a body of data that can be usefully analyzed alongside speech patterns for male characters. To complement this account of speech in the Odyssey as a whole, the second part of this chapter analyzes in detail a single key theme in the poem: the presentation of song. When songs are presented, the full range of speech presentation techniques, each complementing the others, works together to make song uniquely prominent and engaging for the audience. At the same time, speech presentation techniques for song stress the notion of narration and keep the character poets who narrate at a distance from the external audience compared to the main narrator of the Odyssey itself. SPEECH PR ESENTATION SPECTRUM IN THE ODYSSEY Many aspects of speech presentation in the Odyssey emphasize the interactive and expressive features of conversation. As we will see in Chapter 6, this is a key difference between the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Odyssey has a higher proportion of direct quotation than the Iliad does at the level of both the main narrator and the characters. Compared to the Iliad, the Odyssey presents more assertives, more questions, and more of both problematic and reactive moves, all of which in different ways either require or strongly imply an interactive conversational exchange. overall patterns of speech presentation We find 1,158 presentations of speech in the Odyssey, divided relatively evenly—at least in comparison to the Iliad—between speech presented by the main narrator (628 instances, 54 percent) and by the characters (453, 41 percent).¹ In terms of speech presentation mode, 676 (58 percent) of the speeches presented in the Odyssey use direct quotation, 285 (25 percent) use indirect speech, and 207 (18 percent) use speech mention. Forty-two more (4 percent) include free indirect speech along with other...

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