No Place Like Home

Abstract

This article discusses feeling at home through the lens of three works of art: the film The Wizard of Oz, Homer’s epic poem, The Odyssey, and Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot. For Dorothy home is a metaphor for the state of her sense of self at a moment of developmental crisis. For Odysseus home is a very real place and utterly crucial to his identity as a Greek warrior, husband, father, son, and king. For Estragon and Vladimir, the homeless tramps of Waiting for Godot, home is a concept all but unthinkable, and yet an idea of what home might mean persists in what the two mean to one another.