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Grendel's relationship to society
Analysis of the character grendel in beowulf
Analysis of the character grendel in beowulf
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Isolation Have you ever felt as though you’re alone in the world, even though you are not? In the book Grendel, the main character is the last of his species, excluding his mother who might as well be non-existent in the novel. Grendel is a monster who speaks a language very similar to that of the humans he watches almost constantly. He feels a certain attachment to them throughout the whole novel, but he is unable to become close to any of them due to his horrifying form. The humans are terrified of Grendel, and attack him whenever he comes near. He feels completely isolated, as do many people in our world. The story begins with a flash-back into Grendel’s early years. He is all alone even then, but he is too young to realize it and fills this void with imaginary friends. He talks about how he entertained himself during his early years saying “Crafty-eyed, wicked as an elderly wolf, I would scheme with or stalk my imaginary friends, projecting the self I meant to become into every dark corner of the cave and the woods above” (17). People in our world may invent imaginary friends also, sometimes for companionship, as part of play, or for other reasons. Imaginary friends can serve as an important source of companionship to some children and even adults, especially if companionship is absent for them in the social world. As an example “young children in boarding schools often develop imaginary friends to cope with extreme stress and separation from their intimate relations” (www.phycologytoday.com/z10/fl/mllr.7se.php) Finding a mate is hard for Grendel, especially because he’s the last of his species. However, he still has the same emotions as humans when it comes to love. He first encounters these unfamiliar emotions when Hrothgar is given a wife named Wealtheow. Grendel thinks she is beautiful, and starts to rethink his war on the humans when he contemplates killing Wealtheow, saying to himself “It would be meaningless, killing her. As meaningless as letting her live. It would be, for me, mere pointless pleasure, an illusion of order for this one frail, foolish, flicker-flash in the long dull fall of eternity.” (108). Even though he is a monster, he still feels the same emotion of love that humans do. Grendel and the humans share a common language, but the humans’ disgust for, and fear of Grendel precludes any actual meaningful exchange.
He is giddy with joy for the battle that will soon commence. Before the bloodshed finally erupts the Scylding king (talks) offers his sister Wealtheow to Hrothgar as a peace gift for the powerful king. Hrothgar accepts the beautiful Wealtheow and Grendel still waiting in the thick forest is suddenly flooded with emotions. Even to the point of saying, “She tore me apart as once the Shaper’s song had done. As for my benefit, as if in vicious scorn of me, children came from the meadhall and ran down to her weeping, to snatch at her hands and dress. “Stop it!” I whispered. “Stupid!”.” Wealtheow emits propaganda not by her words but her actions. Her courage and beauty cause Grendel to see the good in humans which in a way torments him. He sees the children running to her weeping and feels as if he is a child again wanting to be comforted by her. This play on Grendel’s adolescence and lack of a strong mother figure drives her message of propaganda deeper into his subconscious. (Her courageous deeds influence Grendel to the nihilistic view of the
Perhaps he would actually like to live a normal life with the humans. “Some evil inside myself pushed out into the trees, I knew what I knew, the mindless, mechanical bruteness of things, and when the harper’s lure drew my mind away from hopeful dreams, the dark of what was and always was reached out and snatched my feet.” (Gardner 54) It seems as though Grendel would like to change things if he could, but some outside force will not allow it. Even if this is true, Grendel is still inherently evil. Despite whatever dreams he may have. The reader simply cannot ignore the fact that he still does evil deeds with evil intentions. He is seemingly unable to feel love, or at least disinterested in it. He enjoys torturing and killing humans and rarely shows mercy. Due to these facts, it is impossible to say Grendel is a hero in this
This ‘beast’, the protagonist of the story, fights an internal struggle, of which is a part of the Hero’s Journey. Grendel is unable to decide what to make of himself and of the world surrounding him. He has only ever known the world as wild and mechanical, yet he is charmed by the artistic brilliance of the Shaper’s words. Grendel ultimately meets a brutal yet peaceful demise. Standing on the face of the same cliff he found himself in the beginning of the novel, surrounded by mindless eyes, he states, “Poor Grendel’s had an accident. So may you all.” (Grendel, John Gardner, pg.174) Previous to this, he questions if what he is feeling is joy. The reader is lead to believe that Grendel must feel nothing but peace. This, is the concluding moment of his
Throughout John Gardner’s Grendel, the audience bears witness to a creature who has been ostracized by the world around him. Throughout his journey, the stories protagonist tries to live out his own life the way he wants to, despite being labeled as evil by those around him. Due to this constant criticism by his peers, he develops an inferiority complex that he desperately tries to make up for as the story progresses. Throughout his development, Grendel very rapidly moves past his existentialist beginning, through a brief phase of forced skepticism, and into a severely nihilistic point of view.
Grendel, surprisingly, adapts quite well to his society despite its detestation of his existence. Grendel live is a rattlesnake-guarded cave, which allows himself to detach from his society, giving him the necessary space to cope with the troublesome thoughts among his people about Grendel. Unlike Frankenstein, Grendel tries to associate with the members of his civilization but is rejected every time he tries to do so. Every night Grendel goes to Herot to listen to the Sharper’s stories because the history interests him. He is quite intrigued and appreciative of the tales he hears, but when he comes in contact with those from Herot, they do not reciprocate the appreciation of his presence in Herot. The ones he admires so much taunt and torture him to the point they try to kill him for “intruding.” As retaliation, Grendel fights back and raids Herot every night.
After taking a closer look, he can be considered an anti-hero because of his noble and also realistic traits. Grendel expresses some of his humanlike qualities when he says, “Why can’t I have anyone to talk to?” (Gardner, 53). Grendel is lonely because no one can understand him. His mother does not speak his language and although he understands English, the villagers do not know what he is saying. Additionally, Grendel is an outcast because of his appearance. “The doe in the clearing goes stiff at the sight of my horridness” (7). He is misunderstood because he is a beast. Grendel looks so terrifying that it is emotionally challenging for him to always have that awful first impression with others. Furthermore, when Grendel would hear the harper’s beautiful music he would often begin to daydream joyful thoughts. When his mind would wander, he would be quickly pulled back into darkness because evil was his reality (54). Grendel lives a difficult life because he is constantly reminded that his only choice is to live a life of evil. Because he has such relatable feelings of being lonely and an outcast, this causes the reader to consider his point of view as an
On the other hand, it is obvious that "evil" Grendel could not survive without the "good" humans.
In the beginning Grendel’s perspective of himself leads to various encounters that help him discover the meaninglessness to his very own existence. From the beginning through many centuries of pondering Grendel has come to the idea that the world consists entirely of Grendel and not-Grendel. Thus Grendel begins his search for meaning of his very own life with an existential philosophy, the belief that emphasizes the existence of the individual person as a free and responsible agent determining their own development through acts of the will. While Grendel’s overall perspective of nature is that of mindless and mechanical machine, he believes that he is a separate entity from this machine. Furthermore he holds the philosophy that he himself is a god like creature that “blink by blink” creates the world. This philosophy undermined when Grendel notices that events occur before he can think them into existence. Grendel witnesses the death of a deer by the hands of humans: “Suddenly time is a rush for the hart: head flicks, he jerks, his front legs buckling, and he’s dead. He lies as still as the snow hurtling outward around him to the hushed world’s rim. The image clings to my mind like a
Although Grendel is depicted as a hideous bloodthirsty beast because he eats the Danes at Heorot continuously, he has some characteristics of a human gone wild. Grendel possesses the ability to feel human emotions such as envy and fear. When the Danes were having a feast in Heorot, Grendel “had dwelt for a time in misery among the banished monsters, Cain’s clan, whom the creator outlawed and condemned as outcasts”(104-106). He feels envy towards the Danes for making him an outcast of society. He was jealous of the Danes that were having a great time together while he had to live a life of misery alone. Grendel feels fear as well as envy because “he was overwhelmed, manacled tight by the man who of all men was foremost and strongest in the days of this life”(787-789). During the battle between Grendel and the hero Beowulf, Grendel was unprepared for Beowulf’s fighting tactics. He, who usually is victorious after each attack in Heorot, did not expect to be defeated by Beowulf, which is shown because “his fingers weakened; it was the worst trip the terror-monger had taken to Heorot”(764-765). When Beowulf leaves his weapon and decides to wrestle Grendel, Grendel realizes that he is no match for Beowulf’s strength. He feared death just as human are afraid of death. An ordinary person would want to flee if he or she was being wrestled to the ground and about to die. Grendel felt like fleeing but Beowulf did not want to lose any opportunities to kill the villain and thus does the deed in one go. When he realizes that his end was near, “the dread of the land was desperate to escape, to take a roundabout road and flee to his lair in the fens”(761-763). Just as humans in their psychoanalytic development, Grendel had a fight or flight response. When he knew that he was going to die he immediately chose the flight response in which he could not do because Beowulf was much more powerful and aggressive. He does not let Grendel escape. Grendel’s pain is all the more acute because he is brought so close to mankind and yet always kept at an unbreachable distance from society.
Grendel is born a neutral being, perhaps even good, but nevertheless, without hate. The transition which he undergoes to become evil is due to misunderstandings between himself and humans and also meeting with a dragon who is questionably evil. As a young “monster”, Grendel knew nothing other than the cave he lived in and his mother who could not speak any distinguishable language. He was a playful creature who seemed to be like a “bla...
...n very human feelings of resentment and jealousy. Grendel was an unstable and saddened figure because of his outcast status. Though Grendel had many animal attributes and a grotesque, monstrous appearance, he seemed to be guided by vaguely human emotions and impulses. He truthfully showed more of an interior life than one might expect. Exiled to the swamplands outside the boundaries of human society, Grendel’s depiction as an outcast is a symbol of the jealousy and hate that seeks to destroy others' happiness and can ultimately cripple a civilization. This take on the outcast archetype ultimately exposes the Anglo Saxon people’s weaknesses, their doubts and anxieties towards the traditional values that bounded nearly every aspect of their life.
{1} Grendel, it seems, actually didn’t have too much exposure to humans before the start of the poem. He “hunted the moors” (17), likely subsisting on animals he had killed. The reasons why he started killing humans aren’t entirely clear; he had “growled in pain, impatient / As day after day the music rang / Loud in that hall” (2-4). He could also come across as merely curious, as he was “wondering what the warriors would do in that hall” (31-32). This raises a noteworthy attribute of Grendel – though he is often animalistic, he frequently is described as thinking, wondering, or otherwise displaying a human-like nature. The humans think of him not as a raging beast, but as a calculating criminal. But how calculated were these crimes? Grendel doesn’t seem to have planned his war on Herot, especially not that first night. The statements “[Grendel’s] Thoughts were as quick as his greed of his claws” (35) and “delighted with his night’s slaughter” (40) give the
Grendel is alone; he can not know God’s love and be comforted. He is an outcast, and the sins of his forefather have fallen upon him. Evil can not stand God being glorified just as the praising of God by the Danes angered Grendel.
In the novel, Grendel by John Gardner, Grendel, the protagonist, suffers the pain of isolation. He is ignored by many animals, too incompetent for him. He is considered an enemy by some animals such as the bull and humans. He is only accepted by his mother and his imaginary friends. Grendel finds ways to make light of this. He curiously observes everything and appreciates it for some time. Until he realizes it's a pattern, a chaotic repetition of itself. Grendel finds many truths from observing yet is conflicted when the Shaper comes along. The Shaper tells tales that are so convincing and draw in anyone listening, including Grendel. Although he knows that the Shaper is wrong, he can't resist the stories meaning. As he is ashamed of himself
...erstanding of why things are happening the way sees them is due to the lack of communication from the humans, the lack of acceptance from the humans, and his very own ignorance. The three elements have taken him on a journey that leads to his death. Grendel saw past the religious aspect of the story and tried to clear his name from the records because he wanted to be accepted. In Grendel’s mind, the humans and himself have a lot in common.