Lost as Epic Poem, Part 1

The comparative literature reflex kicks in as I bid farewell to my favorite television show

Spoiler alert: I’ve seen the whole series and I’m not holding back

My comparative literature reflex, apparently, is always on, just waiting to be activated. It kicked in last week as I was giving my “Aspects of Epic Poetry” lecture in a World Literature class. I was casting about for contemporary examples that would help students understand what Homer was getting at in the Odyssey – and, lo and behold, Lost was right there to supply me with examples that multiplied the more I thought about them.

Consider the following, gentle readers, and see if you don’t agree with me that Lost, now that the series has ended its run, is a kind of epic poem for our time. I’ll start the discussion of each aspect of epic poetry with examples from a classical epic poem – Homer’s ancient Greek epic the Odyssey and Virgil’s Latin-language, Roman-empire era Aeneid.

Aspect 1: An epic poem centers on a hero

Odysseus, Aeneas, and…Jack?

In Homer’s Odyssey, the hero is a Greek warrior king named Odysseus.

Odysseus and the sirens

In fact, even though the modern English meaning of the word “odyssey” is ‘a long wandering journey,’ the title of the epic poem is derived directly from the hero’s name. Odysseus is brave and cunning, if a touch reckless, and embodies the Greek values of adaptability, well-spokenness, determination, hospitality, and loyalty, to the gods as well as to his men and his wife and son waiting for him on their island home of Ithaca.

Aeneas rescues his father Anchises from Troy

Likewise, Aeneas, the hero of Virgil’s epic Aeneid, embodies the best traits to which a Roman man could aspire. His story, the title of which is also derived from his name, is a kind of origin story for Rome. Aeneas, a Trojan prince and son of the goddess Venus who flees after the fall of Troy to the Greeks, eventually came to Italy and founded the settlement that became Rome. As a hero, Aeneas is brave and determined, like Odysseus, but he also has a particularly Roman sense of duty and seriousness of purpose, and he constantly chooses to follow his destiny over any other temporary comforts. Interestingly, Roman schoolboys in the first century were required to read the Aeneid to learn how to grow into men.

Lost features a different kind of hero, but a hero nonetheless. In spite of the deliciously strong ensemble cast, the plot structure (especially in the first and last seasons and the finale) makes it clear that the writers have always intended the story to have a hero whose personal journey serves as a pivot for the rest of the show: Jack Shephard.

Jack wakes up in the bamboo grove

Jack wakes up on the island after the Oceanic 815 crash chock full of many traits our current culture most admires: he has a brilliant mind and is an excellent neurosurgeon, a field so difficult its practitioners are nearly god-like. (Many classical heroes, such as Aeneas, Hercules, and Perseus, are half-god, half-human.) He has money and dashing good looks, is obsessed with doing his job well, and falls easily into a leadership role among the crash survivors because he both knows how to help people and is willing to do it.

Not too far into the first season, of course, Jack’s hero-facade reveals cracks that make him as much a modern anti-hero as a more smoothly-polished classical hero like Odysseus or Aeneas. Jack is unable to let other people make their own decisions (if he disagrees with them, that is), and his obsession with fixing people readily bleeds over into a need to control them. When Shannon is having asthma attacks, for example, he and Sayid agree to torture Sawyer because they believe he has hidden a stash of asthma inhalers to sell for profit. Sawyer doesn’t have the inhalers at all, we discover, but Jack’s insistence that he does causes pain to Sawyer, to Kate (who has to try to sweet-talk the information out of him when torture fails), and to Sayid, a reluctant torturer who has a crisis of conscience that causes him to leave the camp. Jack consistently solves one smaller problem by causing several bigger ones, and this is true of his character even deep into the sixth season.

Jack, however, probably more than any other character in the show, consciously realizes how emotionally and spiritually lost he is – and that allows him, more than any other character, to undergo a foundational, tectonic transformation. This transformation, we might conclude, is one of the major arcs of the show.

At the end of season 4 when Jack gets off the island with the rest of the Oceanic Six, he gets exactly what he’s wanted from the beginning: to go home. But, strangely, that’s when things in his life get even worse. He develops a drug addiction and a drinking problem, to the point that his medical license is suspended, he ruins an engagement to Kate, and takes flight after flight over the Pacific, hoping his plane will crash again and return him to the island.

Jack considers suicide

At this point, Jack realizes that nothing in his life off the island is at all fulfilling, and he becomes so desperate to finally get things right that he’s willing to team up with (most-often-evil) Ben to get all the Oceanic Six to go back. Much to Jack’s surprise, all of his problems are not magically solved when he returns to the island, and he still makes poor choices and bullies those around him, but he has clearly put himself on the track to redemption.

In the next-to-last episode, when Jack volunteers to be Jacob‘s replacement as protector of the island, he seems to still have a compulsion to fix things. However, the most important action Jack takes during this time is letting go – of his status when he passes the position to Hurley, and of his life when he sacrifices himself to turn the light back on. Tellingly, Jack lets go of his job as protector more easily than he’s let go of ANYTHING in the show before. He even kept that scratchy beard for longer.

The last few scenes of the island timeline show how completely he has changed. He has actually trusted Hurley – the big dude who generally needs to be told what to do and says “dude” all the time – to do the island’s most important job without his help. The moment when the water and the light come back on, Jack is not only pleased but immensely relieved. Sure, he’s saved the island and, presumably, the entire world – but more importantly for him, he’s figured out exactly what he needed to do and gotten it done. He’s fixed something huge without causing more seemingly insurmountable problems. (Many kudos to Matthew Fox for making the scene both beautiful and emotionally satisfying.)

In terms of overall structure, Jack’s entry into and departure from the island are even the bookend moments of the entire series. His eye opens in the bamboo field in the first scene of the pilot, and it closes in the same place in the series’ very last scene.

Jack dies in the bamboo grove

Vincent the dog is even there to keep him company. Of course, island time and events tend to be cyclical anyway, but using Jack’s eye to bookend the series also places Jack’s particular story arc at the pivot of the rest of the individual character stories.

The changes in the other major characters, in fact, all seem to be echoes of the fundamental shift that takes place in Jack. Sawyer learns what love is because of Juliet, but he briefly returns to his rapscallion ways after she dies. Ben has a beautiful moment with Alana in which he chooses the good, but he does later ally, perhaps out of desperation, with the Man in Black /Locke. Only Jack’s development, it seems, could be plotted as a straight (though slow-moving) line.

Granted, Jack’s development as a hero is personal/spiritual/emotional in a way that would likely be foreign to Homer and Virgil, whose heroes mostly move the plot forward without dealing too deeply with emotional issues. However, Jack’s flaws, struggles, doubts, and glaring contradictions are precisely what make him a hero for our time, not theirs.

Aspect 2: An epic poem begins in media res

(Latin for: in the middle of things)

An epic poem doesn’t start when the hero gets up in the morning and brushes his teeth. It throws the audience right into the middle of the action.

In the Odyssey, the action begins when Odysseus has already lost all of his men in his struggle to return to Ithaca after the Greek victory in the Trojan War. He is stranded on an island, a captive of the sea nymph Calypso, and the gods of Olympus have decided it’s time for her to let him go so he can finally make it home. The Aeneid begins at a similar point: Aeneas, a Trojan prince, has already fled the destruction of his native city, bounced around the Mediterranean for a bit, and come ashore at Carthage in northern Africa, where Queen Dido is preparing to take him in.

In the first scene of Lost, similarly, Oceanic 815 has already crashed. All of the scenes on the plane and in the Sydney airport come later, as flashbacks. In very first moment of the show, something terrible has already happened: Jack has somehow been thrown from the plane into the bamboo field, and he wakes up in relative quiet before finding the beach full of wounded and bloody people and a screaming engine that sucks in one hapless person before exploding. Like the Odyssey and the Aeneid, Lost does not completely explain how this situation came about until several episodes later. The most important thing at the beginning is the drama of the moment.

Jack and Locke rescue another survivor

(This is one reason, by the way, that the show FlashForward fails a bit in its apparent bid to scoop up Lost viewers, even though the actual “flash forward” scene is cut almost beat for beat the same as the opening scene in Lost. Alas, the comparison video has been taken down from YouTube, but this will give some indication of why some Lost fans thought there would be a connection. FlashForward begins with its characters waking up in the morning going about their business. An intriguing show, no doubt, but not exactly epic.)

Aspect 3: The opening passage contains the major themes

Here’s Homer opening the Odyssey: “Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns / driven time and again off course, once he had plundered / the hallowed heights of Troy. / Many cities of men he saw and learned their minds,/ many pains he suffered, heartsick on the open sea, / fighting to save his life and bring his comrades home.”(From The Norton Anthology of Western Literature, Vol. I. Translated by Robert Fagles.)

And Virgil opening the Aeneid: “I sing of warfare and a man at war. / From the sea-coast of Troy in early days / He came to Italy by destiny… /A man apart, devoted to his mission… / [Aeneas and his men] wandered as their destiny drove them on / From one sea to the next: so hard and huge / A task it was to found the Roman people.”(From The Norton Anthology of Western Literature, Volume I. Translated by Robert Fitzgerald.)

In Lost, the pilot episode works the same way as Homer’s and Virgil’s opening lines; all the major themes are there. (For quick reference, see the transcripts for Part 1 and Part 2.)

For one thing, the mysteries of the island appear almost immediately. The smoke monster visits the camp and thrashes around in the trees during the castaways’ first night on the beach, and Sawyer shoots a polar bear on the first hike. The group on the hike with Sawyer, in a quest to get a message to the outside world, finds that their signal is blocked by Rousseau‘s creepy transmission that has been playing on a loop for 16 years, claiming “they’re all dead” and asking for rescue. Charlie, at the end of the episode, gets the line that asks one of the show’s central questions: “Guys, where are we?”

Locke teaches Walt about backgammon

Back on the beach, Locke is laying out another of the show’s central questions as he explains the game of backgammon to Walt. The game is old, he says – older than Christ – and it’s a play of opposing forces. “Two sides,” Locke says. “One is light. One is dark.”

Also importantly, conflict between parents and children, is present from the very beginning. Michael and Walt, though father and son, have some of the pilot’s most awkward scenes as it becomes clear they don’t know each other at all and are trying to figure out the nature of their relationship. Claire, of course, is expecting a baby she has ambiguous feelings about, but we see the beginning of her love for baby Aaron when he kicks for the first time after not moving for a couple of days immediately after the crash.

Other major parent / child tensions – between Locke and his kidney-stealing-conman father, between Jack and his now-dead-formerly-superior-neurosurgeon father, between Sawyer and his duped-by-a-conman-homicidal-suicidal father, between Kate and her cancer-burdened mother and blown-up stepfather, between Sun and her powerful-controlling father, between Desmond and Penelope’s powerful-controlling father (Widmore), between Daniel and his former-others-leader mother (Eloise), between Miles and his Dharma-training-video-scientist father – don’t show up until later. But the awkwardness between Michael and Walt, as well as between Claire and baby Aaron, seems to stand in for and anticipate all other parent-child relationships from the beginning.

Plus, of course, we’re introduced to many of the characters’ driving instincts: Jack fixes people after the crash, Kate is helpful and surprisingly resourceful when she stitches Jack up with a sewing kit, Locke is having a great time on the island, Charlie wants everybody to know he was in a band, Boone half wants to be a hero and half wants to look out for Shannon, Shannon gives herself a pedicure. Hurley takes care of Claire and later distributes food. Sayid jumps on the technology of fixing the survivors’ only radio. Sawyer starts a fight with Sayid and comes full-on with his trademark sarcasm. Interesting, too, is the fact that one of Sawyer’s earliest sarcastic remarks puts Jack literally in his place: “Whatever you say, doc. You’re the hero.”

Then, too, there are the tensions between other characters that include misunderstandings, urgent demands and language barriers, as well as continual division and re-division of groups of castaways.

For more themes, see the Pilot entries (Part 1 and Part 2) on Lostpedia.

Are you buying any of this so far? Coming soon, discussion of four more aspects of epic poetry: action across a vast setting, divine intervention, invocation of a muse, use of epithets. Plus I’ll talk about why that afterlife / sideways timeline actually helps my case.