Grendel as the eternal other: Monster culture in John Gardner’s Grendel

Abstract

Monsters have been playing a vital role in literatures from time immemorial. The term ‘monster’ has been used in historical, geographical and ideological contexts to eliminate and demonise what is considered to be marginal, deviant and degraded. Monster narratives aid in realising our fears and anxieties from wars and other disasters to political situations.  Monsters are cultural constructs of the terrible, what we are insisted to hate or reject. Monster theory is thus an influential tool for analysing the unease of a certain culture. The paper puts into question the rationality or coherence of life and how monsters are constructed socially as well as culturally with latent objectives and who takes genuine interest in creating them. Nevertheless, in Grendel, Gardner has presented the monster in a different scenario, altering the setting by giving the narrative authority to the monster, Grendel. The novel is a retelling of the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf, narrating from the point of view of the monster or Grendel himself and is given the power of articulation and reasoning, to think and understand the society around him. Grendel is not an embodiment of goodness, but the question of how he becomes a monster gets evident through the narration from the monster’s own point of view.