John Gardner's Point Of View In Beowulf

John Gardner is most known from his novel Grendel, a retelling of the famous Beowulf myth in the monster, Grendel’s, point of view. This new version is in Grendel’s point of view and tells us a little more information about Grendel’s motives and reasonings behind his killings of human beings. When writing the story from Grendel’s perspective, John Gardner is attempting to make his audience sympathize for the monster Grendel a little more than we would when reading the story Beowulf. In the story Beowulf, Grendel is simply a monster who must be defeated in order to protect the people. Grendel’s point of view is not mentioned in Beowulf therefore reader’s had no option to sympathize for him. His urge to kill humans seemed meaningless and for that reason we could not understand or sympathize for him. In the story Beowulf, Grendel is not as important as most of the other characters. His thoughts are not shown to us and everything he does is seen from the human’s point of views. However, the version in which John Gardner writes tells us otherwise and gives us a better perspective of Grendel’s story and why he is such an important character. …show more content…
The story starts off with Grendel being young and how when he came up from the surface of the sea he simply went into the forest and played. When young Grendel went to play in the forest his curiosity lead him to discover new things. While Grendel was letting his imagination and curiosity guide him through the woods he was injured. When this happened Grendel simply cried for his mother in pain like any other young child would. By putting this into his novel, John Gardner showed Grendel’s original innocence. This for the most part shows that Grendel wasn’t born a monster, but was lead to become one after experiencing the cruelties of