Comparing Grendel and Oedipus Rex

Parallels between Grendel and Oedipus Rex

A messenger hurriedly arrives at a palace to tell king Oedipus, that his father, Polybus, the king of another town, has died at an old age of natural causes. The message's receptor and his queen, therefore, assume that Oedipus has escaped his fate as told by the oracle at Delphi that he should murder his father and marry his mother. There is reprieve of worry until it is revealed that the man who died was merely Oedipus' adoptive father and that Oedipus had indeed once killed his father and was married to his mother. Oedipus was not the king of his fate.

"'Pointless accident,' not pattern, governs the world, says Grendel, who, as a consequence, adopts an existentialistic stance," explains Frank Magill in Critical Review of Short Fiction. This point has been expressed in numerous critical papers by various essayists. One may wonder, however, whether this is the only way to interpret an incredibly ambiguous story in which no question is ever clearly answered nor clearly formulated. One may wonder, actually, whether the author meant for his work to be analyzed in this way at all. The author, John Gardner, spins a tale of a monster held viscously to his destiny of an unnatural death. No matter what Grendel does, his death is predetermined. Though he tries to disprove fate to himself by believing in existentialism, the belief that actions create the future, he never validates that point of view. John Gardner's purpose in writing Grendel was to express that the future is completely unavoidable.

Grendel may be paralleled to Sophocles' "Oedipus Rex" which describes the story of Laius and Jocasta, the king and a queen of Thebes, who are told by the oracle at Delphi that the fate of their newborn son is to someday kill his father and marry his mother. They believe that they can change that destiny by killing the child but their plan backfires when, unannounced to them, the child grows up far away and fulfills his destiny by eventually murdering Laius and marrying Jocasta, neither of whom he knows is his parent. "Oedipus Rex" is analogous to Grendel because in both stories the main character has a fate which is exceptionally clear but he simply does not believe it, quite on the contrary, he believes that his actions will create his future, but he is tragically mistaken.