ABSTRACT
Ulysses is trustworthy and remains courageous in spite of his subterfuges. Ulysses has been said, with the exception of Christ, to be the most frequently mentioned and best-known figure of Western tradition. Ulysses is commonly seen as the prototype of cunning. Ulysses' voyage is an endless meander of starts and stops and reversals, and the course of his reflections is likewise marked by an infinite number of shifts and deviations within his soul. Memory, for Ulysses, is no sealed, archival repository, but a fluid act of advancing creativity. Ulysses was endowed with the first true memory in the history of the human race, and its power lay in its ability, in a single stroke, to couple absolute courage – which in earlier epic was far too easily called into play – with the invention of fidelity to the self and to the self's particular moorings.
