Cover of Scribner Book Company 2003 paperback reprint edition – the edition I own (fair use)

(9) JONATHAN SHAY –

ODYSSEUS IN AMERICA: COMBAT TRAUMA & THE TRIALS OF HOMECOMING (2002)

Companion and sequel of sorts to Shay’s Iliad, Achilles in Vietnam, this is not so much an adaptation of the Odyssey as the usage of it as a lens for combat trauma and the concept of “moral injury”.

I can’t find any source for this book as an influence on Nolan’s film but the themes of the film are too uncannily similar for it not to have been influenced by the book. It certainly has been an influence on my own planned adaptation of the Odyssey…but I’ve said too much.

I’ll let the Amazon blurb for the book speak for it:

“In this ambitious follow-up to Achilles in Vietnam, Dr. Jonathan Shay uses the Odyssey, the story of a soldier’s homecoming, to illuminate the pitfalls that trap many veterans on the road back to civilian life…Shay deepens our understanding of both the combat veteran’s experience and one of the world’s greatest classics. In Achilles in Vietnam, Dr. Jonathan Shay used the story of the Iliad as a prism through which to examine how ancient and modern wars have battered the psychology of the men who fight. Now he turns his attention to the Odyssey, the story of a soldier’s homecoming, to illuminate the real problems faced by combat veterans re-entering civilian society. The Odyssey, Shay argues, offers explicit portrayals of behavior common among returning soldiers in our own culture: danger-seeking, womanizing, explosive violence, drug abuse, visitation by the dead, obsession, vagrancy and homelessness…Shay shows how Odysseus’s mistrustfulness, his lies, and his constant need to conceal his thoughts and emotions foreshadow the experiences of many of today’s veterans.”