The Odyssey doesn’t open with Odysseus. It opens with his son, a young man who has grown up entirely in his absence, watching a houseful of suitors devour his inheritance while he’s too inexperienced and unsupported to stop them. The first four books belong almost entirely to Telemachus, and they are, in miniature, their own coming-of-age story — a boy learning, under the goddess Athena’s careful guidance, how to speak in public, command a ship, and claim authority he doesn’t yet feel he has earned.
It’s easy to skip past on the way to the more famous monsters and islands, but Homer is doing something structurally deliberate: letting the reader watch a son grow into readiness at exactly the pace his father is fighting his way home, so that when the two finally meet, neither is quite the person the other expected.
Their reunion, and the joint slaughter of the suitors that follows, only works dramatically because Telemachus has earned his place in it — not simply as Odysseus’s son, but as a man in his own right by the time his father arrives.
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