Grendel Is Evil Essay

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In Grendel by John Gardner, Grendel is widely known as a monster. However, once this novel is portrayed first-person through Grendel’s eyes, it becomes evident that he is not the true beast. The true evil in the novel originates from the humans. The reader interprets Grendel’s thoughts in a new perspective forcing them to realize all of Grendel's actions result from the cruelty of humans acted upon him. He has a fear of being overrun by the evil humans which causes him to act as he does. Grendel is not evil because he simply mocks the interactions he sees from the humans during their wars and towards him during their first encounters all the way to when Grendel is brutally killed by the human Beowulf. Grendel sat in the top of the trees of the forest and observed the humans. He watched hunters from different bands brutally fight and then return to their camps to tell their stories. He watched these bands grow larger and fight harder in order to gain power. Then the threats got more serious, and the real …show more content…

Grendel is in the tree with an injured ankle which gets exacerbated by the “mechanical” bull charging at him. Then the humans come and Grendel realizes something, “... and suddenly I knew I was dealing with no dull mechanical bull but with thinking creatures, pattern makers, the most dangerous things I’d ever met” (Gardner 27). Grendel encounters humans and discovers that they are not mechanical. This is threatening to Grendel because it seems as if everything he has dealt with thus far has been mechanical. He knows they are dangerous because they are unpredictable, and smart, nothing like the bull he had faced earlier. They have the ability to break out of routine and make new patterns. His hatred of Hrothgar and his people began that night when they attacked him when he posed no threat, he was simply hungry. This initiated Grendel’s relentless obsession with

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