『그렌델』 읽기의 두 방향: 부조리 주인공 그렌델 대 도덕주의자 가드너

Abstract

In his novel Grendel John Gardner retells the Old English epic Beowulf from the monster's point of view. Grendel who acts as first-person narrator and protagonist in the novel is, however, intended as a negative example. With this rhetoric strategy readers are allowed to first accept with absurdist Grendel with modern sensibility and then later reject his nihilistic rationalism, acknowledging Beowulf as a genuine hero. Defeating Grendel, Beowulf delivers Blake's vision that demands to reject the dictates of pure reason and heed the redemptive power of the imagination; the hero promises that the ruined world will be restored as long as the human mind keeps faith in idealistic vision and heroic acts. Like early reviewers of Grendel, however, many readers read the novel in a different spirit, seeing Grendel as a sympathetic character, an absurdist hero. One of the possible answers to different interpretations of Grendel would be that first-person narration is a wonderful device by which to achieve reader identification but unsuitable to establish an ironic perspective on one's narrator. Another possible answer would be that the most of Gardner's readers cannot reach a point at which to reject the monster whom they first identified with. In Grendel the monster is portrayed as an alienated being who feels despair and rage when rejected by humans, and who displaces these feelings with violent acts; by contrast, the humans in the novel reveal their hypocritical natures again and again in political maneuvers and personal confrontations, and further darken Grendel's view of the world. Finally, if readers have sufficient knowledge of the Vietnam and Iraqi wars, they would see Unferth's persistent act to be willingly killed by the monster as a parody of heroism, one of the traditional values highly praised by the author.