Comparing the Moral Superiority of Grendel and Frankenstein

Comparing the Moral Superiority of Grendel and Frankenstein

Seeking friends, they found enemies; seeking hope, they found hate. Social outcasts simply want to live as the rest of us live. Often, in our prejudice of their kind, we banish them from our elite society. Regardless of our personal perspective, society judges who is acceptable and who is not. Some of the greatest people of all time have been socially unacceptable. Van Gogh found comfort only in his art, and with a woman who consistently denied his passion. Edgar Allen Poe was considered "different" - to say the least. These great men, as well as Grendel and Frankenstein, do not “fit” into society. Also like these men, Grendel and Frankenstein are uniquely superior to the rest of mankind. Their superiority is seen through their guile to live in a society that ostracizes their kind, their true heroism in place of society's romantic view, and the ignorance on which society's opinion of them is formed.

Grendel, though he needs to kill to do so, functions very well in his own sphere. Grendel survives in a hostile climate where he is hated and feared by all. He lives in a cave protected by firesnakes so as to physically, as well as spiritually, separate himself from the society that detests, yet admires, him. Grendel is "the brute existent by which [humankind] learns to define itself"(Gardner 73). Hrothgar's thanes continually try to extinguish Grendel's infernal rage, while he simply wishes to live in harmony with them.

Like Grendel, Frankenstein also learns to live in a society that despises his kind. Frankenstein also must kill, but this is only in response to the people's abhorrence of him. Ironically, the very doctor who bore him now searches the globe seeking Frankenstein's destruction. Even the ever-loving paternal figure now turns away from this outcast from society. Frankenstein journeys to the far reaches of the world to escape from the societal ills that cause society to hate him. He ventures to the harshest, most desolate, most uninhabitable place known to man, the north pole. He lives in isolation, in the cold acceptance of the icy glaciers. Still, Dr. Frankenstein follows, pushing his creation to the edge of the world, hoping he would fall off, never to be seen or heard from again. Frankenstein flees from his father until the Doctor's death, where Frankenstein joins his father in the perpetual, silent acceptance of death.