Comparing the Act of Creation in Grendel and Frankenstein

The Act of Creation in Grendel and Frankenstein

Man has always been driven to create. We constantly shape the world around us by inventing stories of heroes and monsters, by crafting complex but passionate ideals about good and evil. Some relish in the power that this manipulation of reality wields; others are more innocent in that they are simply yielding to a universal longing for something in which to believe.

In both John Gardner's Grendel and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, creation is a central theme. Victor Frankenstein is inexplicably driven to make a creature like himself, though he doesn't have any external reason for doing so. The monster himself enacts a kind of creation; he seeks to understand the truth of human nature by reading man's works, but also indulges in his own stories and fantasies of a life lived among friends. Shelley explores to some extent the morality of such creation (at least on the part of Victor Frankenstein), but Gardner is more interested in what the act of creation reveals about the nature of existence.

In Grendel, nearly all of the characters are driven to shape the world to their ideas. Hrothgar spends his life crafting a government. Grendel's mother is described as loving her son "not for myself, my holy specialness, but for my son-ness, my displacement of air as visible proof of her power (138)." Both Grendel and the Shaper constantly seek the ability to reshape reality with words. While they have differing motives, all of these acts of creation give power and significance to the creator. As Baby Grendel desperately convinces himself, it is the act of observing and commenting on what is outside that makes one real: "I understood that, finally ...

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...endel would undoubtedly un-create if he really had that power. He understands too late. His death is as necessary as the death of a tree in winter; a new morning lies in wait for the Danes, as it does for all men in the circle of living and dying.

Works Cited and Consulted

Boyd, Stephen. York Notes on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Longman York Press, 1992.

Gardner, John. Grendel. Vintage Books, 1989.

Patterson, Arthur Paul. A Frankenstein Study.

http://www.watershed.winnipeg.mb.ca/Frankenstein.html

Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus. Edited with an Introduction and notes by Maurice Hindle. Penguin books, 1992

Strehle, Susan. "John Gardner's Novels: Affirmation and the Alien." Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Dedria Bryfonski. Vol. 10. Detroit: Gale Research, 1979. 218 -219.