Odysseus never becomes a part of any of the places he visits; he observes. With cold scorn, the Lotophagi; with fear, the cyclops; with detachment the Phaiakians.
In the Iliad, every man who fell in battle had a name; in the Odyssey, only those people who affect Odysseus are granted such recognition. His shipmates go largely unnamed.
Where the story of Achilleus was a rending of the bonds of humanity and their restoration, Odysseus has few, perhaps only one, such bonds. In each situation we see him try to maximize his gain (as with the Phaiakians) and minimize his loss (as with Scylla and Charybdis). He never a part of things, as Achilleus is a part of the Argives.
And Achilleus' choice, so noble if so doomed in the Iliad, is repudiated in the Odyssey. Better to be the lowliest man alive, than king of the dead, we are told. This exchange between live Odysseus and dead Achilleus seems to me one of the more directed responses in the Odyssey--directed at the other poet and his work. To be the best is noble, but it is sophrosune, cunning, wit, intelligence, a kind of wisdom, that sails home and lives another day.
The detachment Odysseus has is one of the necessary qualities of a poet. Neil Gaiman puts into the mouth of Shakespeare, in The Wake (the best of the Sandman novels by far), these lines: "Whatever happened to me in my life, happened to me as a writer of plays. I'd fall in love, or lust. And at the height of my passion, I would think, "So this is how it feels," and I would tie it up in pretty words. I watched my life as if it were happening to someone else. My son died. And I was hurt; but I watched my hurt, and even relished it, a little, for now I could write a real death, a true loss."
If Achilleus partook, a little, of the first Homer's self, Odysseus partakes more than a little of this second Homer. And this second Homer seems to love fancies more than the first; he loves voyaging to strange lands, be they true or false or stranger still. It is telling that Odysseus himself gives the stories of his travels, in the main.
Still, to prove himself, Odysseus must come home. He slaughters the suitors, and has an odd, sparring sort of homecoming with Penelope, a woman at least as strong as he was, though in her own ways. But he will not stay.
Even as the Odyssey ends with peace between Odysseus and his enemies, Poseidon remains unplacated. Odysseus, having come home after so long, must again set out, this time across the land, with an oar on his shoulder. And when he reaches a place so far from the sea that his oar is taken for a winnowing fan, and sacrifices to Poseidon, he will at last be free from the burden of travelling.
He will never be free. I'm going to quote James Branch Cabell at length, from Something About Eve, when he imagines the outcome of Odysseus' journey.
But always the wiles of much-enduring Odysseus evaded the full force of Heaven's buffetings, so that in the end he won home to Ithaca and to his meritorious wife; and then, when the suitors of Penelope had been killed, he went, as dead Tiresias had commanded, into a mountainous country carrying upon his shoulder an oar, and leading a tethered ram, for it was yet necessary to placate Heaven. Beyond Epirus, among the high hills of the Thesproteans, he sat the oar upright in the stony ground, and turning toward the ram which he now meant to sacrifice to Poseidon, he found Heaven's amiability to remain unpurchased, because the offering of Odysseus, who was a rebel against Heaven's will to destroy him, had been refused, and the ram had vanished.
