Karl Kerényi observed that the Iliad’s world is stamped by “the finality of the fate that befalls its short-lived hero,” and that this finality is what excludes Hermes—the god of alternative pathways, of dissolution of fatal opposites—from the poem’s central action.

Hillman on Myth and the Senex–Puer Relation

James Hillman argued that “the pathology and the cure are there together” in myth, and that myth “unfolds, moves, and at its different joints leads off into various possibilities.” The Iliad enacts this principle through its central figure. Hillman’s observation that Odysseus “resolves a morbid division fundamental to the Western psyche” between senex and puer applies inversely to Achilles: he is the figure in whom that division is most violently exposed, the puer who cannot reach the senex because death intervenes before the integration is complete.