What are the motifs in The Odyssey by Homer?

Family and home are recurring ideas in this story. Odysseus spends the entire poem longing to return to Ithaca and to his family there – his wife, son, father and mother. When the story begins, Odysseus has been away for twenty years, ten of them at Troy and ten of them lost at sea. He longs to see them again, and they miss him terribly. His mother has committed suicide out of grief, his father has removed himself to a secluded farm, his wife cannot bring herself to remarry, and his son is desperate for any news of his father that he can get. A family means love and devotion and a strong attachment that can never be broken.