Themes for Grendel
Uploaded by scam655 on Jan 20, 2025
Themes for Grendel
The story “Grendel” is about a monster, and his battles with a king named Horthgar. The story is in first person point of view, and because of this, we notice a lot about Grendel. We notice he is a sort of weird and very lonely person. This is because he lacks companionship. The only person he can hang out with is his mother, who can’t communicate with him, so he is always left by himself. It also doesn’t help that he has been living for a very long time. How old he is is unclear, but he himself hints at being old. I am going to be taking a look at the story and analyzing the different themes there are in the first three chapters.
The first theme I’m going to cover is existentialism. This is a view where God is either dead, or he has abandoned us. Grendel continuously asks himself who he is as he battles his existentialist perspective on the world and himself. In the second paragraph of the text Grendel says “I alone exist” This is a sign that he became an existentialist because that implies he had either lost faith in God or just accepted that there was no such thing and he alone is responsible for what happens to his life. This is exactly what existentialism is.
The next theme is self discovery. He comes to the realization that only his mother gives him attention while others seem to glance past or through him. Grendel makes an effort to make peace with the humans by bringing to them a dead body of one of their people. However, the people of Herot respond by attacking him with axes that had venom on them. He then embraces the role of the villain by “being the monster they want me to be”
The final theme is loneliness. Like I had mentioned in the introduction, Grendel is a very old creature. For all those years he has had nobody to communicate to. All the animals he tries to talk to are scared of him, his own mother that lives with him can’t understand him, and humans, who he shares a language with, try to kill him at sight. In chapter two of the story, Grendel's mother shows up to help him just as he thinks he is about to die to the humans. When he wakes...