Quote 1
I
understood that the world was nothing: a mechanical chaos of casual,
brute enmity on which we stupidly impose our hopes and fears. I
understood that, finally and absolutely, I alone exist. All the
rest, I saw, is merely what pushes me, or what I push against, blindly—as
blindly as all that is not myself pushes back.
Grendel has this revelation while the
bull attaks him in Chapter 2. The bull assails
Grendel mindlessly, never changing its tactics even though it is
getting nowhere with its assault. Grendel suddenly realizes that
the world is just like the bull—mindless and destructive without
any discernible plan or reason. Any attempt to determine such a
plan or pattern in the world is a misguided effort, reflecting more
the desire of the seeker to find such a pattern than the actual existence
of such a pattern. Grendel’s revelation has a second component as
well, which he phrases as “I alone exist.” Clearly, as Grendel is
undergoing a brutal attack as he makes this assertion, he does not
literally mean that everything else in the world is just an airy
figment of his imagination. Rather, it is, for Grendel, a means
to organize the way he perceives the world. While he once saw the
world as a frightening mass of images, now he can separate the world
into categories—namely, Grendel and not-Grendel.
This revelation marks the transition between Grendel’s
innocent, ignorant childhood and his adulthood as a student of philosophy. Having
come to understand the world as a pitiless chaos that fails to provide
a moral code or ethical system to guide his actions, he begins to
question how he should live his life. This moment also marks a transition
into adulthood in the sense that it causes a split between Grendel
and his mother. Earlier, Grendel has understood himself as part
of his mother, not as an individual being in his own right. When
he is stuck in the tree, he looks for his mother to emerge from
the shadows around him. If he sees her, then he believes the madness
and confusion he sees will return to a sense of order. Grendel’s
mother never arrives, however, forcing Grendel to accept the responsibility
of creating order himself.
