So for my summer assignment I decided to read the great epic Beowulf and it's retelling Grendel which tells the backstory of Grendel and his decent into the monster Beowulf eventually fights and kills. I'm only about 75 pages into it, but so far it's pretty interesting. However, at times it gets really weird, like Grendel describing these things that look at him in his cave, but never acknowledge him. While it's definitely a very bizarre novel, its still entertaining, especially when you see Grendel go though a personal quest.
The second chapter of the book shows when Grendel was young and began to explore outside of his cave and into the real world. He sees moonlight for the first time, gets caught in a tree, feels pain, and has his first experience with man. However, they try to attack and kill him, so not a great first impression. The later chapters are about more contact with humans and him learning about the world, science, religion, philosophy, and so on. However, the second and third chapters are what caught my eye immediately as it puts him through a quest; the loss of his innocence.
In How to Read Literature, Foster says that there are certain points that need to be addressed for a quest: a Quester, place to go, stated reason, challenges, and a real reason to go. This quest almost answers every single point. The quester is Grendel and the place to go is the outside world. Some challenges he faces is getting stuck in a tree, being attacked by a bull and then by men. He never openly states why he takes this quest, but odds are its simple curiosity. The true reason for his quest is to learn and interact with the outside world, the world he has never encountered before. This is also his loss of innocence, as for one of the first times ever, he experiences pain and learns that people fear him. Rather than look at the world as a safe haven, he sees it as what it is; a dangerous place full of violence. This is expanded more in the next two chapters, where he even uses some swear words he learned from men (like a child becoming an adult sometimes tends to do). But during this chapter, his quest for adulthood and loss of innocence makes for a very interesting read.
Reading this post reminded me of White Fang's journey through life in Jack London's 1906 epic. Like Grendel, White Fang is born sheltered from the outside world and knows nothing but the cave in which he was raised by his protective parents. Soon enough, however, he ventures out into the real world and discovers a place with the live and the not-live, the dangerous and the safe, the hunters and the hunted. While originally this world peaks his interest and whets his appetite for discovering more about the world that he's now a part of, White Fang soon discovers the cruelty of man and their godlike, domineering power. White Fang ends up traversing across the Klondike with his human companions, but his journey is so much greater. He learns the meaning of power, of fealty, of self-preservation, of brutality, and, incredibly, of love. There are enough twists throughout this novel that you're never quite sure whether there will be a happy ending for White Fang, but we as readers are reassured in the end. I hope Grendel will find some sort of redemption in his story, too.
ReplyDeleteAfter reading Foster's chapter on quests, I was really surprised at how many books follow the quest model that he described. It's really interesting to connect that to the idea that there is no original story, and that all fiction has to be based off of something else. Just reading your synopsis of Grendel, I already see connections in the basic plot idea to books that I've read and books that I've read about. It's really interesting to be able to find these seemingly strong connections to unrelated books after reading HTRLLAP (my stars! That's an ugly abbreviation.), and I think that it should be a good topic of discussion for our first few weeks of class.
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