Socratic Seminar Questions

Socratic Seminar Questions
With the third-person point of view in the epic poem, the narrator only describes Grendel’s actions, but not what he is actually feeling in the story: “He found them sprawling in sleep, suspecting/Nothing, their dreams undisturbed...he slipped through the door and there in the silence snatched up thirty men” (lines 35-37). The reader only looks at the actions Grendel is doing, which elicits less sympathy for the character. In Grendel, however, the reader is able to zone into what Grendel is feeling and his reasoning behind his motives: “I can barely walk, my chest-hair matted with dribbled blood, and then the roosters on the hill crow, and dawn comes over the roofs of the houses, and all at once I am filled with gloom again” (Gardner 12-13). Grendel does not actually like killing the Danes, but it is the only outlet for him to express himself.
In the epic poem Beowulf, Grendel is characterized as the main epitome of evil. The poem describes Grendel as a descendant of Cain and a murderous creature banished by God (lines 20-21). The author clearly develops Grendel as a parallel to the devil, incapable of goodness and cursed from birth, and does this to universalize Grendel as a character based on all evil in the story. However in the novel Grendel, the reader has a sense of what Grendel is thinking throughout his deeds and explains why he wanted to wreck havoc on Hrothgar and the Danes. He was sick and tired of Hrothgar’s extensive wars that were filled with violence and murder: “I remembered the ragged men fighting each other till the snow was red slush, whining in winter, the shriek of people and animals burning, the whip-slashed oxen in the mire, the scattered battle-leavings: wolf-torn corpses, falcons fat with blood” (Gardner 50). Grendel is expressed as something capable of doing good, yet he chooses evil, because of the unforgiving society in which he lives in and their obstinate refusals of understanding him.
Instead of trying to...