The movie O Brother, Where Art Thou? has many parralels drawn from Homer's The Odyssey. The epic poem is a story of a journey home just as the movie is and both contain several stories evolving from the trips themselves. There are several aspects of the movie that are borrowed from Homer's classic tale.
As the movie opens, Ulysses Everett McGill has just escaped from a prison chain gang in the Deep South with two buddies, Pete and Delmar. They want to make it across the state to dig up some treasure that George buried before he was caught. They only have four days to do it because after that the state will be flooding the valley in which the treasure is buried in order to create a man-made lake to support a new dam and their treasure will be at the bottom. Throughout the film the boys meet an array of interesting characters. The first is the elder blind man on the railroad when the men escaped from prison. The others are the three beautiful singing women at the river who seduce Pete, The bible salesman, Big Dan "T", the baptism group at the river, and Sheriff Cooley, the policemen with the sunglasses. .
The elder blind man on the railway was referring to Tiresias. This mysterious character is in reference to Tiresias the blind prophet. The blind man told the group many odd things about their journey to come. He told Everett that he would not find the treasure he seeked. There was no way they could have found the treasure Ulysses told Pete and Delmar existed because it did not exist. He told the others that there was a hidden treasure that he seeked and they were damming a river. The treasure would be covered by this river if they didn"t get there in time. In the end of the movie, the treasure he seeked was his wife's wedding ring and he had to get there before the river flooded the area. He got the ring but it turned out to be the wrong one, so he never received the treasure he seeked.