[wi Grendel] Walk This Way - No, Skip It

In Chapter One Grendel approaches the meadhall to terrorize it; in Chapter Three he flees from it in despair having heard the Shaper, and in Chapter Four Grendel approaches the meadhall, seeking reconciliation, before the 12 year war.

And of course the end of the book is Grendel running away, shorthanded, from the meadhall and Beowulf.

At first I thought Gardner was doing this "walk toward," "walk away" to set up a framework to watch Grendel's changes. As I tried to write about that, I came to see these walks as a weakness, an awkward artifact of Gardner forcing the story to the conventions of regular progressing narrative, while not bothering to put together a plot.

There's nothing much that happens to Grendel in the novel except spinning out ideas; the progression of Grendel's feeling is fairly simple, a thought experiment of exposing a sensitive outcast to a poet. Gardner's dramatizing of the story uses the cuts in time to deflect attention from the thinness of the story through Chapter Five, to make it feel like there's more going on than there is. The "action" in the first few chapters comes down to walking toward and running away from the meadhall, and sometimes killing, sometimes refraining from killing. The scene where Unferth is humiliated and then swims to the cave has a cartoonish character, and that is the most significant interaction between Grendel and another character.

Gardner abandons traditional narration for the most part after Chapter Six (Unferth's humiliation). Chapter seven begins "riding out time like a helmless sheepboat" -- the very phrase is unmoored, it's spliced onto a three word sentence with a comma. And the rest of the book does feel like it's waiting for Beowulf, with incidents of the Goat and the death of the Singer. The most plotty bit, in Chapter Seven, is bracketed with the notations "Cut A" and "Cut B" (The bracketed material is the rise of the Helmlings arrive and Hrothgar takes their king's sister, Wealtheow, for a wife, and Grendel decides not to kill her).