O Brother, Where Art Thou?

O Brother, Where Art Thou? has a relatively different plot than The Odyssey, but at the same time there are many characters who are direct parallels of characters from The Odyssey. However, there are also a group of characters that have more ambiguous parallels between the movie and the book.

The most obvious parallel is betwen Big Dan, who wears an eye patch, and the cyclops Polyphemus. The parallel is seen in the way that Big Dan robs Everett and the way that Big Dan almost loses his eye to a flag, only to be later crushed by a burning cross. Another obvious character parallel is the sirens in the movie, who obviously represent the sirens from the book who lure people in with there singing, but also can be seen to represent Circe in the way that they "turn" Pete into a toad, because in the poem, Circe turns Odysseus's crew members into pigs.

The themes from the poem can also be seen translated into the movie. For instance, Odysseus's greatest flaw in the book is his excessive pride, and in the case of Poseidon and the cyclops, his pride is what caused Poseidon's animosity towards him. In the movie, Everett also has excessive pride in his hair, with his special hair product that actually end up helping the police officer that is chasing them. In both the book and the movie, the excessive pride hurts the main character. The other most obvious plot parallel is between the suitors in the poem and the man who is trying to marry Everett's wife. In both stories, Everett/Odysseus is traveling home to prevent a marriage to a "suitor," and Everett's daughters even call Vernon a suitor multiple times in the movie. The final plot similarity is the emphasis on deception throughout The Odyssey by both Athena and Odysseus, and the large use of deception in the movie. Everett's entire escape is based upon the elaborate deception that he told his prison inmates about having buried treasure, and Everett was also originally arrested for posing as something he wasn't, which is another form of deception. All of these examples show that there exists many character and plot similarities between the two stories, some more obvious than others.