"Poor Grendel!" the lonely hypocrite

          John Gardner opens Grendel with an image of an old ram minding his own business and staring intently into the distance. Grendel characterizes this ram as “stupidly triumphant” (5), in the way that it ignores Grendel completely. Hating this treatment, Grendel stomps and yells and even throws large rocks at the ram, but it doesn’t budge. This irritates Grendel to no end, because it’s tells the story of his sad life: being either ignored or feared by all creatures. The ram’s apathy represents the detachment Grendel feels from the world and all the creatures that inhabit it. When Grendel asks bold questions about his existence, he is met by the unresponsiveness of the sky, which “ignores [Grendel], forever unimpressed” (6). Like the ram, the sky symbolizes all the forces that isolate Grendel; in turn, he is tormented by the futility of a purposeless, lonely, and charge-less life.

          The dispassion Grendel encounters in the natural world contributes to his view that life is unnecessarily harsh. He views animals as stupidly simple in their joyful repetition of tasks, such as mating and growing, year after year. However, Grendel’s criticism of the mechanical actions of the “brainless budding trees, these brattling birds” (6) around him are juxtaposed with his own, repetitive deeds of murder. Whenever he kills a Dane at the mead hall, the action is mindless, just like the mating of rams or the growing of grass. Grendel is aware that he is trying to fool himself “with thoughts that I am more noble” (6). Anguished, conflicted, and confused, Grendel searches for meaning in a world that he wants to both abandon and enter.

          Of course, Grendel isn’t entirely alone: he has his mother. Although she is described as miserable and lethargic, Grendel’s mom might actually be in better shape than Grendel, in the way that she refuses to dwell on the “dusty mechanical bits of her miserable life’s curse” (11). But, seeing as Grendel’s mom is entirely incommunicable, she cannot properly articulate to her young son the occasional necessity of apathy. Frustrated by extreme loneliness, Grendel assumes the archetype of a crazy old man who yells at unassuming pigeons in the park.

Despite his frequent outbursts directed at the sky, Grendel is very aware that what he feels may not be genuine anger. For example, Grendel says, “I toy with shouting some tidbit more – some terrifying, unthinkable threat, some blackly fuliginous riddling hex – but my heart’s not it” (10). Grendel fakes powerful emotions in an effort to feel something, anything; he would rather feel flares of artificial rage than acknowledge that he numb of all feeling. In fact, a slight tweaking of the Lumineers’ song “Stubborn Love” matches Grendel's scenario rather well:

It's better to feel pain, than nothing at all
The opposite of life’s indifference

Now, George Willard employs a very similar concept in “An Awakening” (what is a blog post without a connection to Winesburg, Ohio?). Like Grendel, George is also an adolescent male who has trouble deciphering his personal role – or lack thereof – in the grand scheme of existence. Ceaselessly racking his own brain for answers, George walks the streets at night and shouts “words without meaning, rolling them over his tongue and saying them because they were brave words, full of meaning” (An Awakening, 155). Similarly, Grendel tries to prove to himself that he is capable of having emotion by screaming angry, impassioned words to the skies. Exaggerating his emotions is Grendel’s way of affirming that he is a sentient being. In this sense, Grendel tries to be more human, despite the fact that he outwardly ridicules the lunacy of human emotions.