miscellaneous iterated circles

In O Brother, Where Art Thou , Ulysses Everett McGill is fairly obviously intended to parallel Odysseus. In many ways, they are alike. In others, they are rather different. To me, the biggest difference between Odysseus and Ulysses is their fatal flaw. Odysseus' flaw is pride, that he must reveal his name to Polyphemus, or that his emotions get the better of him and he acts rashly. Ulysses, however, struggles with vanity instead. We can see this with his insistence on getting Dapper Dan pomade instead of Fop, or when he wakes up after the sirens, immediately worrying about his hair. It's implied that the Sheriff was able to track Everett and company because of Everett's distinctive pomade. (At the end, we see the bloodhound sniffing in Everett's massive stash of Dapper Dan). While Odysseus and Ulysses both have a way with words, in general Odysseus is better with them. Odysseus is very quick to fabricate elaborate stories (as much a storyteller as a liar), but Evere...

Odysseus lies a lot. He's a crafty man, deceptive, tactful, calculating. Since he is the only one living to tell his story, we are sometimes left wondering how much of his story is really the truth. In the court of the Phaeacians, Odysseus spends whole books just telling stuff that happened to him. The only others to witness those events were Odysseus' crew, who died. In a number of places, Odysseus portrays himself as being heroic, stronger, able to stay up for days and nights on end, just plain better than his crew. (It's always the crew that wants to stop and rest on the island, that wants to open the bag of winds, that eats the Sun God's cattle.) Yet at the same time, he also portrays himself in sometimes unflattering ways. When Eurylachus leads the rest of the crew to eating the Sun God's cattle, Odysseus gives him spoken lines and reasonable arguments. Or when Odysseus reveals his name to Polyphemus, over the protests of the crew, cursing them and dooming ...