Grendel : Evil Essay

In the novel, the readers are allowed to see the progression of Grendel. As Grendel starts to grow up there are changes in his personality, more specifically his innocence. Grendel becomes conflicted, being the monster that he is and the choices that he makes. Grendel wants to know what his purpose in life is, or what is the purpose of life at all. While Grendel becomes evil there are signs him struggling against that way. Now I will talk about Grendel’s balance between good and evil.

When readers are introduced to Grendel, he is a melodramatic creature who has no one to truly understand him. His emotions contribute to Grendel is caught in situations where he tries to interact but there is a barrier. When he encounters humans they fear him because of how violent he is or seems to be, but they retaliate with the same violence. The irony in this passage is that humans are attacking him because

He thinks that humans are easy to understand and yet also very difficult. According to him, humans have a good insight and great observation skills, but they are violent creatures that use weapons instead of words to get what they want. They are even violent amongst themselves, making Grendel wonder what is actually wrong with them. But they are also unwearyingly hardworking. “Meanwhile, up in the shattered hall, the builders are hammering, replacing the door for the fiftieth or sixtieth time, industrious and witless as worker ants – except that they make small, foolish changes, adding a few more iron pegs, more iron bands, with tireless dogmatism.” (7) This fragment of the novel shows that humans do not get tired easily and that they have sheer will on matters concerning their safety and

Grendel discovers and begins to gain the understanding/knowledge of different concepts such as power, etc. In addition, he observes how humans interact with one another throughout the twelve years of war; Yet, his attempt to communicate with humans gives him the title horrific monster. This leads to his loneliness and isolation from everyone. Furthermore, Grendel is left without any companion. Grendel can be best described as a monster who has human qualities but can be both rational and irrational. In Chapter 1, Grendel has an outburst because of the ram that appears.. “I stamp. I hammer the ground with my fists. I hurl and skull-size stone at him. He will not budge. I shake my two hairy fists at the sky and let out a howl so unspeakable that the water at my feet turns sudden ice and even I myself am I left uneasy.” This demonstrates how Grendel is hostile and belligerent. His emotions get the best of him and blinds his consciousness and awareness of how harmful he can be towards

He struggles with the thought of being denied and offbeat. He uses violence as a way to wrestle with his feelings. The violence starts when Grendel goes to the Meadhall and kills thirty men on the first night. He says, “I was Grendel, Ruiner of Meadhalls, Wrecker of Kings! But also, as never before, I was alone” (Gardner 80). His main goal was to destroy the Meadhall and all of King Hrothgar’s people. Grendel now feels like he has power and this helps him feel better, but he also hints at the fact that he is still feeling lonely and hopeless. Therefore, he decided to cause more havoc and kill more people to help him deal with the pain. When Grendel hears some men who seem to be happy and having fun, he wishes that he was able to be happy like them. He wants to fill a void of emptiness. This motivates him to keep performing numerous attacks on the Meadhall. The violence and problems he causes lasts for twelve years until Beowulf rips his arm off. Grendel just wants to be able to communicate with someone and feel accepted. He says, "Why can't I have someone to talk to? The Shaper has people to talk to, I said. I wrung my fingers. Hrothgar has people to talk to” (Gardner 53). If he had someone who accepted him and was able to understand him, he may not have felt that he needed to perform his attacks as a way to try to lessen his pain. There would not have been twelve years of

Grendel is undoubtedly a killer. He is does not take pity on the humans at all. When he fights them, he fights and kills ferociously.

Like many whom suffer the same disorder, Grendel completely changed his mind, extending from one topic to the exact opposite. He goes against his own ideas as if he were two totally opposing characters. He also always thought the dragon was near. Grendel allowed the ways and beliefs of the dragon to get in his head. He would claim he could “smell the dragon’s scent” whenever something sinister occurred. All of these symptoms, in addition to the isolation from Hrothgar’s people lead to the overall cause in withdrawal from society. Grendel’s emotional disturbances caused him to react completely unreasonable and rather foolish many times within his life.

Grendel exhibits human feelings and characteristics in many ways. Although Grendel is a monster “forced into isolation by his bestial appearance and limited imagination” (Butts) he yearns to be a part of society; he craves

"The sky says nothing, predictably. I make a face, uplift a defiant middle finger, and give an obscene little kick. The sky ignores me, forever unimpressed. Him too I hate, the same as I hate these brainless budding trees, these brattling birds (Gardner 6)." He also developed a hatred toward humans after getting stuck in the tree. On that dark night, he learned that humans were dangerous because they tried to hurt him instead of helping him. "It wasn't because he threw that battle-ax that I turned on Hrothgar. That was mere midnight foolishness... It wasn't until later, when I was full-grown and Hrothgar was an old, old man, that I settled my soul on destroying him—slowly and cruelly (Gardner 30).” The humans were not as innocent as the Shaper perceived them to be. Grendel lurked in the darkness and watched them as they battled and destroyed their own kind. Ultimately, the dragon with the dark scales made an immense impact on Grendel’s character. Grendel was not sure of his purpose in life, and the dragon confirmed that he should be evil by killing the humans. At first, Grendel resisted. However, hatred led to Grendel’s determination to punish mankind.

In Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf, Grendel is nothing but an evil fiend that needs to be slain, “a fiend out of hell, began to work his evil in the world” (Heaney 9). Grendel is portrayed as an evil monster that has only been wreaking havoc and terrorizing a kingdom for an extended amount of time because it thrives on the pain of others. Seamus states, “Malignant by nature, he never showed remorse” (Heaney 10). Grendel is made out to appear as little more than a monster, “insensible to pain and human sorrow” (Heaney 11). He is portrayed to have little to no human qualities, to be the furthest thing from

Like a puppy nipping, playfully growling preparing to battle with wolves." [Page 16] In his early years, Grendel shares the naivete of all things youthful, unchained by the perceptions and limitations the mature mind places on reality in its attempt to instill order to a disorganized world. He has, at this point in his life, no rational concept of reality as a whole, he sees it in vague shadow-shapes and imaginary cohorts. In this condition he finds a certain playful joy. While it is an admittedly childish state of mind, he is quite happy at play, as are most children. When the change and growth comes, it brings him down from the ignorant bliss he feels in his immaturity.

Though he does not actually remember how he’d learned it, John Gardner’s Grendel speaks a language which is similar to that of the human characters in the book and is, therefore, able to understand them. During Grendel’s first encounter with humans, he pleads to them for assistance when he is caught and wounded in a trap. The leader of the humans is Hrothgar who eventually becomes king of the Danes. When Grendel’s cry for help is mistaken for a cry of attack, the humans attack Grendel and wound him more painfully than flesh could be wounded. The first intelligent, speaking beings, with some similarity to himself, which Grendel has encountered, have attacked instead of helped him. It is in this moment that Grendel forms his first opinions of existence; the outside world does not seem to embrace good as he does. In a one-way conversation he has with his mother after the incident (Chapter 2), Grendel says, “ the world resists me and I resist it. That’s all there is. The mountains are what I define them as.” In the statement, “ the mountains are what I define them as”, Grendel starts to form a belief of a sort of reality which does not actually exist. Life is meant to be lived as the owner wishes to live it; it is what you

Grendel never became enemies with the Scyldings until he sought out the route of this shadow, the dragon. When the dragon says unto Grendel in the line, “If man’s the irrelevance that interests you, stick with him! Scare him to glory! It’s all the same in the end, matter and motion, simple or complex,”(Chapter 5, page 73) he tricks the human-like beast into carrying out havoc on the villagers. After this long, deadly confrontation with the fabled creature, Grendel always seemed to smell the evil presence of the dragon. This smell made the monster go mad and his actions towards the Scyldings got to the point of massacres. Some may think the winged lizard remained the source of the shadow, but it was not the only thing that led to Grendel’s actions. The Shaper, that seemed to enchant Grendel with his songs, became another key part of Grendel’s shadow. This shadow made it hard for Grendel to continue to grasp the basic concepts of the

After being trapped in between two trees, Grendel finds himself contemplating about the importance of his existence and the existence of others. He has come to the conclusion that the world has no meaning and all the things he experiences are not true. He believes that the only thing that he can truly count on is his existence and the beliefs he alone possesses. When speaking about the overall nature of humans, Grendel speaks of how he disapproves of their values and how they view the world. He doesn't understand why they spend time admiring the different seasons, and shows no remorse over the fact that he is a murderer.

In the novel, Grendel, the sheltered and abnormal creature that is Grendel adopted a solipsistic view and became overwhelmed by the underground world he had grown accustomed to after experiencing an interaction with man for the first time. After years of exposure to solely the underground world, Grendel emerged from his cave and found the real world. Upon his first interaction with man, Grendel had an immediate sensation that "there was something wrong" (21). From the moment Grendel first encountered man there was an installation of a barrier between the two. The clear distance that was created contributed to Grendel's solipsistic view because it caused him to be isolated from this newly found world which led to his belief that the outside world was meaningless