John Gardner's Grendel is written
from the monster's point of view, or more precisely, the work is presented as if the
monster wrote it. First of all, then, readers are likely to identify with the point of
view any story is told in. That's a basic fundamental of story telling. Thus, we at
least somewhat identify with Grendel.
Other than that,
however, the answer to your question is extremely complex, and fun in the way that the
book is fun.
Grendel, as narrator, shows himself playing
mind games to entertain himself, and literary games, if you will, as he writes the
novel. And the reader sees Grendel grow as a writer/artist as the novel progresses. He
writes a chapter as if it were a screenplay. He writes poetry, beginning with weak
"doggerel" poetry, ending with some pretty good stuff, and experimenting with iambic
tetrameter and other rythms and meters along the way. He connects each of the twelve
chapters with a corresponding astrological sign. He says that when he was younger, when
he was still playing cat and mouse with the universe, he used to play games. But of
course, he still does. He is not a nihilist as the dragon is--he still plays games to
entertain himself, and is still hoping for some kind of meaning in
existence.
Perhaps most specifically, to answer your
question, Grendel, you should realize, is a quintessential unreliable narrator. Even
though he ridicules humans for rewriting history and creating art and for attributing
meaning where there is none (astrology itself, the rewriting of history for the sake of
art, the gods, etc.), that is exactly what he does. In writing the novel,
Grendel is imitating the Shaper.
Grendel is
exposed to and relates various philosophies throughout the novel: nihilism, political
anarchy, existentialism, etc. Grendel, espousing existentialism throughout much of the
novel, agrees with the dragon (the nihilist) that there is no pattern to the universe
and existence is inherently meaningless. Unlike the dragon, however, he doesn't just
sit on gold. He finds meaning, at least of a sort, the same way the humans do--through
art.
His pounding of Unferth with apples is art, of a
kind: it's also slapstick comedy. He dances and tips an imaginary hat and sees the
humor in and thinks it's funny when the humans cover the light because he, accustomed to
living in an underwater cave, sees in the dark.
And he
writes. Grendel's universe is a universe of mere chance, with no inherent meaning.
Beowulf could have lost. But Beowulf wins, only by chance, because Grendel slips. That
is Grendel's interpretation, predicated on his
philosophy.
Is Grendel a hero? Only in the sense that
anyone who intellectually sees the universe as mere chance, but still wakes up in the
morning trying to accomplish something, is a hero. But in the end art is
the hero of the novel. It is art that makes living worth
while.
Grendel is not a hero in any
traditional sense, however, even though we tend to identify with him instead of the
humans, who are at least somewhat presented by him as idiots. He eats children, at
least partially, to make the heinous point that they should have listened to their
mother. He eats children as a gruesome joke.
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