AOIT English IV – Grendel
Chapter 6 – Quote Explications
Today each group has been assigned one extended quote from the sixth chapter of Grendel. For your quote your group will conduct a close reading, and then will be responsible for presenting the following to the rest of the class:
· Read around your assigned passage and provide some context for Grendel is saying – help us understand where the quote fits in with the rest of the chapter.
· Explain/analyze the quote. What meaning does the quote convey literally? What is its greater figurative meaning?
· Where does the quote fit with the rest of the novel? Think about this in terms of some of the book’s big ideas and in terms of Grendel’s journey as a search for meaning.
· The philosophical underpinning of this chapter is existentialism – how does your quote relate to this philosophy?
· Also, and this is more general and somewhat separate: who is the harvest virgin?
Group 1:
“Nothing was changed, everything was changed, by my having seen the dragon. It’s one thing to listen, full of scorn and doubt, to poets’ versions of time past and visions of time to come; it’s another to know, as coldly and as simply as my mother knows her pile of bones, what is,” (75).
Group 2:
“I no longer remember exactly what [the shaper] sang. I know only that it had a strange effect on me: it no longer filled me with doubt and distress, loneliness, shame. It enraged me. It was their confidence, maybe – their blissful, swinish ignorance, their bumptious self-satisfaction, and, worst of all, their hope,” (77).
Group 3:
“I had become, myself, the mama I’d searched the cliffs for once in vain. But that merely hints at what I mean. I had become something, as if born again truths I know and the heart-sucking conjuring tricks of the Shaper; now that had past… But also, as never before, I was alone,” (80).
Group 4:
“But though I laughed, I felt trapped, as hollow as a rotten tree. The meadhall seemed to stretch for miles, out to the edges of time and space, and I saw myself killing them, on and on and on, as if mechanically, without contest… All at once I began to smash things – benches, tables, hanging bead – a rage as meaningless and terrible as everything else,” (81-82).
Group 5:
An evil idea come over me – so evil it made me shiver as I smiled [Grendel taunts Unferth about being a hero]… The dragon scent in the room grew stronger, as if my teasing were bringing the old beast near,” (83-84)… and: “I got more pleasure from that apple fight than from any other battle in my life,” (86).
Group 6: “Go ahead and scoff… Except in the life of a hero, the whole world’s meaningless. The hero sees values beyond what’s possible. That’s the nature of a hero. It kills him, of course, ultimately. But it make the whole struggle of humanity worthwhile” (89).
English IV – Grendel
Chapter 7 discussion & Analysis
1. On 91 when talking about why he doesn’t finish off Hrothgar in one night Grendel says “form is function” – what does this mean? And why has he stopped killing for the season?
2. Why has Hrothgar traveled to a neighboring kingdom? How might the Shaper sing about this journey (as opposed to its reality)?
4. Grendel gets really psyched for what seems to be a certain bloodbath – why? Try to come up with a more sophisticated answer than ‘more meat for him’ or ‘Grendel likes death.’
5. How does Wealtheow affect Grendel? What is it about her that gets to him (after all, she does “tear him apart as once the Shaper’s song had)?
6. What effect – specifically – does Wealtheow have on Hrothgar and his men? Relate this to how she affects Grendel. Also, how does she cancel out what Grendel has done to Unferth?
7. From this scene, what can we gather about Wealtheow’s power? What evidence do we see that her power has limits?
8. Grendel decided not to kill Wealtheow, but what he does is arguably worse (since her entire existence has been one of sacrifice for the sake of her people). How does he destroy her, or “wreck another theory.”