That's the story as summarized in a potential entry for a 'most trite message board comment' competition of some sort. The actual story is another story. Either that or people have been doing it wrong and reading too much into it for a couple of thousand years.
You wanna argue with Tolstoy?
I might refer you to TVtropes. All stories are the same eventually.
- Jack Woodford might have actually said it
- It works (sort of) for Anna Karenina
Who's making stuff up?
In Woodford's autobiography he attributes it to H. Allen Smith: https://books.google.com/books?id=AckQU9DPMnwC&pg=PT299&dq=J...
"My mother, southern to the bone, once told me, "All southern literature can be summed up in these words: 'On the night the hogs ate Willie, Mama died when she heard what Daddy did to Sister.'"
And it's easy to attribute!
Well, I was drunk the day my mom got out of prison And I went to pick her up in the rain But before I could get to the station in my pickup truck She got runned over by a damned old train
That is sloppy reasoning, and it bothers me. (As it should you)
Edit: I'll summarize the arguments you've made so far and the obvious objections.
- The Odyssey is a trivial story of a dude returning to his wife [Not true, 20-odd centuries of scholarship saying otherwise]
- There is a tiny number of stories all stories reduce to (possibly two), a Major Writer of a World Literature Said So [not true, and, obviously, he did not say that]
- The above idea is somehow supported by tvtropes [tvtropes is wonderful but also full of thousands of tropes rather than two]
Every single one of these things is just deeply and demonstrably wrong. The totality of your evidence is... a made-up Tolstoy quote and a country song? It's hard to tell how to even argue with this.
Of the 24 books of the Odyssey, Odysseus' famous seafaring wanderings account for just 4. Likewise, the narrative focuses on Odysseus in 20 out of the 24 books, and he is at home, on Ithaca, for 12 of them. Clearly, Odysseus trying to get home is not the main point of the story, however memorable some of his nautical adventures are.
If you ask me, the poem is about barbarism versus civilization, revenge versus justice, family, and the nature of heroism.
But that doesn't have anything to do with this article though, which I rather liked.
> You wanna argue with Tolstoy?
Tolstoy famously described Shakespeare as "insignificant" and didn't understand what all the fuss was about: