Grendel's Quest to Empiricism

Grendel’s Quest to Empiricism

Grendel is a monster isolated and refused by the cultural society around him. Knowing this, he tries to understand the world around him by immersing himself in human culture. Throughout the story, we see Grendel change his ideology from a solipsism to empiricism through self knowledge.

Grendel feels forbidden from society and uses this to justify his violent actions and himself that he is the superior race. In the beginning of the novel, Grendel is defiant feeling trapped of having to cycle through to the “twelfth year of my idiotic war with destroying mead halls and killing humans to mock “their crackpot theories.” Even he feels his individualistic existence is being challenged, he finds himself supported by the dragon who states that the idea of “God” who “made the world” is ridiculous and introduces him to the idea of nihilism, where there is no spiritual goal since no existence matters. The dragon's idea strengthens Grendel’s defiance and power. Unferth challenges Grendel’s ignorance, stating that “ A hero is not afraid to face the cruel truth”. However, in spite of this, Grendel still finds entertainment in his theories that heroes are people who are always judged by everyone, and weighing on if they are still classified as a hero.

The origin of Human behavior startles Grendel, as he wonders why they develop and how some can even have redeemable qualities. The idea of God was one of his major foes he had to overcome, because He provided the answer to everything Grendel didn’t understand. Wealtheow was also a complete opposite of Grendel’s attitude as she resembled purity. Grendel couldn’t wrap his mind around having redeemable qualities in humans, because it would justify his own actions as unethical. We see near the end of the book that he begins to contradict his theories. To give himself confidence, he plans to defeat Beowulf