554 words about Grendel

Honestly, I thought Grendel was a stellar novel and that is not just because my Grandpa's doppelganger wrote it (John Gardiner vs John Gardner heh heh). I'm not exactly sure why, but I really relate to Grendel, although that does sound a bit odd, me having a connection with a giant, furry, monster, man-baby. Well no matter how odd my connection was, I did gain a pretty impactful take away from this novel. Out of all of the ruckus and nihilism and false meaning, I found the tale to be a warning. If your life is out of balance, you are going to end u;p being ripped apart, maybe even literally by a dreamy, horse-shouldered, oven-chested evil hero. Ever since chapter five, when the dragon ruined poor little pacifist Grendel, Grendel was fighting an inner war between two very contrasting sides. When Grendel first meets the Shaper, he is presented with beauty, art, meaning, purpose, family, even friendship. The Shaper unintentionally teaches him to be calm, to only kill when he feels it is necessary, to observe from a quiet place among the trees, even to desire friendship. In my opinion, Grendel seems pretty happy during this part of his life, if we omit the part where he begs and sobs for a friend of course. Then, mystified by the Shaper's mystical ways, Grendel feels like he needs some sort of explanation; he knows that the Shaper is a liar and the wants to know why it feels so real, so he goes down to meet the dragon. One important thing that I found here is that while under the Shaper's wing, Grendel is above the people, up in the trees, but when he goes to see the dragon, Grendel must go down below the ground into a dark, dirty cave. It is almost as if he is falling down into the dark side. When he gets down there, the dragon just rips him apart. He plants this idea that nothing matters, that Grendel himself does not matter, that the world is a cycle, so what you do really does not matter because it will happen anyway. He makes Grendel feel small and insignificant. After his dumb encounter with the dragon, Grendel becomes a different monster-person-thing. Grendel decides that he might as well completely destroy the men, since it does not matter whether he does it or not, so he rips them apart. He goes into their village and, upon finding that he is invulnerable, he just kills a bunch of people. The Shaper never bred this sort of violence within Grendel, even though he did sing of wars and rivalries and such. So basically my main point of this blog is to show how contrasting these two sides of Grendel are. He's got his peaceful little, softhearted, poetry loving side. But then he also has his horridly mean, torturous, ugly, murderous side. So from all of this, I felt like Gardner was really telling his readers that they need to find a balance within their own lives, take all of the bad influences and all of the good influences and find a good, neutral central point to live in. Because if you do not, you will end up going crazy, singing songs, dancing, killing, and maybe even in the end desiring death.