Grendel's Life - the Cycle of Life and Death

Grendel's Life - the Cycle of Life and Death

  • Submitted By: prisci
  • Date Submitted: 12/18/2008 7:24 PM
  • Category: Book Reports
  • Words: 369
  • Page: 2
  • Views: 849

Grendel in chapter one of life is depicted as the ironic he provides examples of a joker of life. This chapter is about Grendel being an existentialist. "I create the whole universe, blink by blink"(Gardner 22). In here the author wants to make a point about only the self exists. Grrendel still may know that there is more to the world than grendel’s ego. The universe still exists when Grendel closes his eyes. For example when Grendel says "I observe myself observing what I observe", (Gardner 29),The author here may be trying to make fun of the ideas of a person being and nothing in these chapter. The house in the novel is of life, the individual self and its potential, this is why Grendel ends up being an existentialist, to try to give meaning to his life. Grendel by while wishing of meaning of life, he rejects the meaningless.

Grendel insists he is caught in a meaningless cycle of life and death. Grendel may wish that his world was not more than enough and that he was not in the world for nothing, but in viewing it with his existentialist view of the world, he only sees an indifferent universe, he hates it to live as the creation of God, because he knows or he wants that he wants to transcend himself and achieve oneness with nature. Another of the reasons why Grendel I an existencialist it is the drago. He questions his thoughts and at the beginning he acts as if he were just a “thing”. He tells his mother that he now understands "the meaningless, objectness of the world, the universal bruteness."(Gardner 28) his focus now is with meaningless objects.

Grendel also knows that he is free to change his decision. But he tells himself why should he. So he does not accepts his potential to choose a behavior and continues to believe that he's a meaningless object. Grendel (the existentialist monster). As we see in the novel, in the first chapter the house is of life, the individual self and its potential, this is why he turns to be an...

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