John Gardner Interview

The novel Grendel, it seems to me, is essentially a novel about faith and reason. Grendel is again and again given the opportunity of believing something which western civilization has held up as a value. For instance, heroism is one of the subjects taken up in the book very explicitly. A young man named Unferth decides he is going to be a hero. Just on faith he believes in heroes--he hasn't really thought about it--and he's willing to die for this principle. Grendel, who doesn't believe in anything, that's why he's a monster, makes fun of him and makes him doubt the idea of heroism. He gives you all the good arguments, like, only the young are heroic, they go out because they're stupid and they run up the hill at the machine gun. Or, heroism is a knee-jerk response, it's not a free will response, and so on . . . Grendel is given the opportunity to believe in love. Freud can prove to you, if you are willing to listen to proof, that love does not exist, that it's an illusion. It's mutual need or something like this. Any value that we have can be rationalized out of existence, reasoned out of existence. At some point you just have to say I don't care, here I stand. But until that last moment of the novel Grendel is unable to make that leap, and then he makes it because he's sort of pushed over the ledge and driven to it. So that's a book of faith.