|
Post by adamgrace on Aug 20, 2013 20:05:22 GMT
Grendel sees the cave as his home or sanctuary. It's the place he runs to when in trouble or when he needs to collect his thoughts. Grendel's mother resides in the cave as well, but is more rooted in. Caves are often perceived as places of isolation from the world (an example being "The Grinch"). Caves are also places where monsters dwell. So, what is it with caves and monsters? Why are they so closely associated with each other? How might the cave in this novel be used in both literal and symbolic ways?
|
|
|
Post by amysohlberg on Aug 22, 2013 18:53:57 GMT
I would guess caves scare us so much because they're dark and filled with the unknown. Darkness is usually associated with evil and the unknown isn't something that we're usually very fond of. Monsters like caves because they are usually pretty evil and represent the unknown: something unnatural, inhuman, uncontrollable. Also, it's not only in literature that we find scary creatures in caves! There are really freaky animals that actually live in caves (go watch planet earth and you'll know what I'm saying). As for how the cave is used in symbolic ways, the first thing I noticed was its similarity to Plato's cave. At the very start of the book, Grendel describes the cave as a place "where no light breaks but the red of my fires and nothing stirs but the flickering shadows on my wet rock walls" (8). In the Allegory, Plato uses the shadows on the walls to represent the world of the unenlightened mind, where the unenlightened person is not really seeing and feeling the universe as it truly is, but only sees a dim representation of truth. I think Gardner uses the same idea with shadows to represent Grendel's humanity. His mother, who we almost always find in the darkness of the cave, has almost completely lost her human traits. She has become a primal, "life-bloated, baffled, long-suffering hag" (11) who appears to fail to understand any feelings except those of hunger, sleep and a pale form of motherly instinct. Grendel, on the other hand, is constantly at war with his humanity throughout the book, and this plays out in the symbolism of the cave: "'Why are we here?' I used to ask her. 'Why do we stand this putrid, stinking hole?'" (11). Only when Grendel ventures out of his cave to we see him come to conflict with his ways. After witnessing the beauty of the Shaper's songs, Grendel keeps telling himself, "I knew what I knew, the mindless, mechanical bruteness of things" (54), yet he admits, "I was addicted" (54). A short time after, he returns to the cave and sees his mother, yet with the contrast of the glorious songs, he views her as something particularly vile: "She was pitiful, foul, her smile a jagged white tear in the firelight: waste" (55). I think throughout the book, Grendel is really trying to get out of the cave, to escape the pitiful life of darkness that his mother has chosen, but his quest ends in failure. When Beowulf comes and the end of the novel and kills Grendel, he returns to the same darkness that was in the cave: "I look down, down, into bottomless blackness... some monster inside me... dread night monarch astir in his cave, moving me slowly to my voluntary tumble into death" (173).
|
|