Ch.1 Beginning

 

The story begins with a monster, Grendel watches an old ram stand stupid and inert at the edge of a cliff.  Grendel yells at the creature, stamps his feet, and throws stones at it, but the ram refuses to so much as acknowledge Grendel’s presence. Grendel lets out a howl so terrible that it freezes the water at his feet, but the ram remains unmoved. The ram’s stubborn stolidity reminds Grendel that spring has arrived in a similarly undeniable fashion.

 

The first few pages of Grendel echo the beginning of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, a work that features one of the most famous openings in the English canon. I think the opening of the novel expresses the common tendency in postmodern fiction for a work to call attention to its own literariness, that is the fact that a novel is actually a novel, written and crafted by an author’s imagination as opposed to rising naturally out of the characters’ consciousness.