ELA

    In our 9th grade literature project we created a Collage to compare a person from Odysseus’s story to someone in real life. that compared Odysseus’s lonely dog, Argos, who had been abandoned by everyone he cared about to orphaned children. Argos was abandoned by Odysseus for twenty years, and by the time Odysseus returned Argos was at death’s door. He was eventually forgotten and left to die on a pile of dung. No one even bothered to move him. He stayed alive until Odysseus came home, and died a few seconds after he saw him. In book 17, the text says, “Treated as rubbish now, he lay at last upon a mass of dung before the gates...”. The book also says, “ Now misery has him on leash. His owner died abroad, and here the women slaves will take no care of him.”  Argos and abandoned children have similar struggles. They’re both abandoned and forgotten. There are over 20 million abandoned children in the world. This includes foster children, adopted children, and those who have been left on the streets. Imagine you were just abandoned by your parents. You find a new home and a new family, but you can’t stop thinking about the family that turned their backs on you. This scenario is more common than you think. The quote found it book 17 shows how badly Argos is being treated and it also proves that Argos has no one else to rely on. In addition the quote about Argos’s misery and all the people who abandoned him shows use why Argos is laying in a pile of dung alone instead of living in the palace. This has similarities to orphaned children because Argos doesn’t understand why he was abandoned and most abandoned children can’t comprehend why they were abandoned either because of their young age. In addition, Argos has had multiple different masters, this is similar to abandoned children because they move from foster home to foster home until they find one that fits. Finally Argos has numerous similarities to real life orphans because of his multiple different owners and the fact that he has been abandoned by all of them.