Plan for the Final Four Chapters of Grendel

Chapter 12:

Throughout the chapter there are allusions to water and pisces: "feeling the dark power moving in me like an ocean current, some monster inside me, deep sea wonder (173). "Shapes vague as lurking seaweed surround us" (170).

Color imagery: green dust, purple dust, gold

Grendel moves "voluntarily" to his death as he walks toward the edge of the cliff.

"I seem to desire my fall, and though I fight it with all my will I know in advance that I can't win" (173).

Grendel had just sang the song: "The wall will fall to the wind as the windy hill will fall, and all things thought in former times: Nothing made remains, nor man remembers. And these towns shall be called the shining towns!" (172). This song foreshadows Grendel's plunge off of the cliff. In the end Grendel becomes like the Shaper as he predicts what is to come. Like the Shaper, Grendel eventually dies.

"I do not listen. I am sick at heart. I have been betrayed before by talk like that" (170).

"'Poor Grendel's had an accident,' I whisper. 'So may you all'" (174). After Grendel becomes wise and has predicted the future as a "Shaper," he dies. He refers to his entanglement with Beowulf as an "accident," since he had slipped on blood when Beowulf grabbed hold of his arm. In the end as Grendel is about to walk off the cliff, he calls it an "accident."

PISCES: "As you see it is, while the seeing lasts, dark nighmare-history, time-as-coffin; but where the water was rigid there will be fish, and men will survive on their flesh till spring." Biblical reference: fish. Beowulf is symbolically the "fish."

Diction: illusion, dream, chance, fire, darkness, tricks, accident

"The world is my bone cave, I shall not want..." Beowulf says this directly to Grendel. As opposed to Grendel, Beowulf does not need a cave sanctuary to hide out in for protection. Instead the world is Beowulf's "bone cave."

"Art is a lie that tells a truth." Art is the depiction of reality but is not in fact reality. However, what one gets out of a piece of art can speak loudly. Powerful artwork depicting significant historical events has moved people to discover "truth."