Important Characters in the Chapter:
Grendel: The protagonist and narrator of the book, he is introduced as having been waging a war against a kingdom for twelve years. His story consists of a series of flashbacks.
Plot Synopsis:
Grendel begins the chapter in an argument with a ram that he cannot properly communicate with. He moves to torment, pillage, and kill his way through Hart, as he establishes as a twelve year habit, but leaves disgusted as those he harms seems to mourn and celebrate their dead.
Moral Philosophy:
"Do not think my brains are squeezed shit, like the ram's" (6).
Grendel establishes himself as a thinking figure, and sets up a contrast that he will continue to perceive throughout the novel, of his thoughts versus an unthinking world. The chapter emphasizes the distinction between the mind, thinking and anxiety inducing, and the body, an agent of nature.
"Not, of course, that I fool myself with thoughts that I'm more noble. Pointless, ridiculous monster crouched in the shadows, stinking of dead men, murdered children, martyred cows" (6).
Grendel simultaneously asserts that he is no better than the system he engages in, which establishes the peculiar duality in him. His mind doesn't separate him from the world.
"I move down through the darkness, burning with murderous lust, my brains raging at the sickness I can observe in myself as objectively as might a mind ten centuries away" (11).
Gardner is using Grendel to demonstrate that knowledge of how the brain works does not enable the brain to control itself. Gardner is exploring whether or not the brain, or mind, is truly separate from the body as an abstract idea that can't be quantified.
"She'd tell me, in time, I thought. But she told me nothing. I waited on. Tis was before the dragon, calm as winter, unveiled the truth. He was not a friend" (11-12).
Grendel goes back and forth between philosophy, his personal history, and hinting at his internal conflicts. In this case, part of his crisis began by wondering why he existed in the first place, a question his unspeaking mother could not answer. This is anxiety as induced by his brain, not his body.
"I laugh, crumple over; I can't help myself" (12).
A loss of self control is used to frequently show how little of an impact the mind has as an abstract force. In the cases that Gardner presents, the mind and the body function as a single, inseparable unit. This loss of self control includes his desires to eat people even though it makes him ill.
"The red sun blinds me, churns up my belly to nausea, and the heat thrown out of the bone-fire burns my skin. I cringe, clawing my flesh, and flee for home" (14).
The chapter concludes on Grendel, self pitying and miserable, unable to distinguish between thought and action.
Chapter Analysis:
The first chapter of Grendel is as much a character introduction as it is an exploration of the philosophies that drive the novel. Grendel is a creature of habit as much as he is an ideologically torn individual. He murders and eats people, fulfilling his role as established in the source text of Beowulf, but Gardner staples onto those actions an individual having an existential crisis.
The main contributing factor to Grendel's crisis is his inability to control himself, at least in the first chapter. He acts primarily on impulse, just like the animals that he criticizes, and his rational mind cannot conquer the drives of his body. He will note this cynically in animals, and in the humans he observes throughout the chapter, but cannot condemn himself in the same way, despite being subjected to the same environmental forces. It is as if Gardner has decided that ultimately nature holds sway over the mind, and the mind cannot exist in an abstract space as an ideal.