Grendel ESSAY NOTES
INSTRUCTIONS
The paper has no specific length requirement; however you are expected to write a detailed and analytical
response which thoroughly answers the question of the prompt. In your paper, you need to develop your own
voice and style and to adopt sophisticated modes of communicating your ideas.
The purpose of this paper focuses on aiding you in developing an idea about a piece of literature from a particular
perspective. Your response to the prompt should reflect your own thoughts about the novel. Please choose one of
the following prompts upon which you will write your in-class essay. You will need to research one (1) critical
essay or work which aids in justifying your position.
1. Choose one theme* from John Gardner’s novel, Grendel, and through a thorough examination of the
novel, identify how Gardner utilizes characters, situations, or other elements of the work to express that
theme.
2. Although Grendel in Beowulf represents all that is evil, Gardner seems to take a different, more complex
approach in Grendel. Identify some signs of potential goodness in Grendel. What prevents these "seeds" of
goodness from developing?
3. It has been said that Gardner used this ancient tale of Grendel to tell a very modern story about the nature
of Evil and the quest for a meaningful life in the 20th century. In what ways do you find this to be true?
PREPARATION
Determine your individual response to the meaning of the work: your interpretation. Writing your paper will be a
much easier task if you can identify an aspect of the work or the author which intrigues or interests you. Follow
that interest into developing an interpretation which will explain/argue/identify a critical area of the work or the
author which you can discuss in a paper.
Your interpretation will be focused through the criteria contained in the prompt. You may need to refine your
interpretation to respond to the criteria of the prompt. When you have developed your interpretation into a
clearly arguable, identifiable thesis divided into its constituent parts, collect specific facts, examples,
descriptions, illustrations, evidence, quotations, paraphrasing, and/or plot references and/or references to other
elements of the literary work to help validate your interpretation.
In order to help prove your argument, find at least one (1) critical essay or work which relates to the position you
have developed. You must cite this source in your essay and use elements of the source in relation to your
argument.
WRITING THE PAPER
Write what you think and know, not what you think someone else wants. Remove the feeling that you “have to be
a writer” and simply write.
Your writing mantra:
"I am going to write what I think and what I know. These are my ideas about this work and I have
something to say about it.”
A good first step in preparing to write a paper is to Pre-write your thoughts by collecting and developing the
details that you wish to use from the literary work and from your sources. Mindmapping, bubble clusters, spider
diagrams, line clustering, columns, or any other method may be used to organize your thoughts. Whenever you
state something is true, you must show how or why with textual evidence, and you must make your thinking
evident to your reader, so you have to explain.
Then, you should Shape your paper by constructing an outline which organizes your information developed in prewriting into a logical, chronological, or other appropriate sequence of information. Make sure that you clearly
outline the thesis of your paper and that the topic sentences clearly define the thrust of the body paragraphs.
Be prepared to write your essay in class on the date arranged. You may use the Shaping Form during the essay, if
you wish. The form MUST be pre-approved by Mr. Fleming.
*Themes in Grendel:
The Meaning and/or Meaninglessness of Life
The Power of Art/Song/Language/Shaping
The Need for Community
Freedom vs. Determinism
Good vs. Evil