Most good stories start with a fundamental list of ingredients: the initial situation, conflict, complication, climax, suspense, denouement, and conclusion. Great writers sometimes shake up the recipe and add some spice.
Exposition (Initial Situation)
(Monster) Boy Meets (Human) World
In a hellish kind of way, this is a "coming of age story": monster boy ventures away from his home and beastly mother, falls in love with the beauty of the natural world, and has some very bad experiences with humans that scar him for life.
And we mean in a big way.
Grendel—kin of Cain, slayer of Hrothgar's meadhall companions, and terror of the murky deep—makes his way out of the familiar pages of the epic poem Beowulf to set the record straight. It's like Wicked, but with lots of blood, guts, death, and heavy-duty philosophizing thrown in.
What do we learn? Well, for one thing, it turns out that Grendel is not a "monster" without a cause: he doesn't bolt down sour-tasting human warrior meat for his own health. He's got a real, burning hatred for humanity. But to make us understand where this hatred comes from, Monster Boy has to take a trip down memory lane. Gardner shows us that we only know half the story, and he establishes Grendel as sympathetic—if not totally simpatico—character.
Rising Action (Conflict, Complication)
Monster Acts Out; Even Bigger Monster Makes Him Pee Himself
From the moment Hrothgar chucks that ax at Grendel, we know it's pretty much going to be downhill from there. Although Grendel doesn't immediately eat—er, hate—er, both eat and hate the humans, this is where his obsession with them starts.
Grendel finds himself instantly drawn to the humans' world, and he watches them from the shadows. What he sees totally fascinates and horrifies him. Grendel learns pretty quickly that humans are wasteful (look at all the people they kill and don't eat), vicious (look at all the humans they kill), and cunning (look at all the people they plan to kill).
But there's another, different aspect of these creatures that intrigues Grendel: beauty. Grendel hears beauty in the Shaper's words and sees it in the face of Queen Wealtheow. He even half believes in it and hopes for better things. The skeptical, evil side of him, however, draws him toward the dragon—a mythical, cynical, greed-driven, semi-divine character who can see the past and the future. Grendel learns one sure thing from this overgrown snake: despair.
And when Grendel despairs, he eats.
Climax (Crisis, Turning Point)
Here Come the Strangers
As Grendel enters the twelfth year of his "idiotic war" with Hrothgar's clan, he senses that something is coming. It's kind of like that terrible tugging feeling he had when he fell toward the dragon.
Grendel doesn't yet know what we know (if we've read Beowulf, anyway): that he's coming to the end of his journey. But even if he did know this, he probably wouldn't care. The boredom and misery he feels from winter upon winter of solitude and anger are really starting to wear him down. The excitement he feels about the coming trouble seems kind of crazy, but think about how you would feel if you were stuck in a cold room watching CSPAN alone for a decade. It's kind of like that for the Grend.
The energy and excitement he feels when the strangers approach is also a bit of a death wish; it's something he longs for and dreads at the same time. But his eagerness to meet the new dudes on the block really fizzles he actually sets eyes on them: Grendel pretty quickly realizes that there are some things out there even scarier than monsters. In this case, it's Beowulf.
Falling Action
A Firm Handshake
If there's one thing that Grendel is into, it's the concept of fairness. He understands early on just how unfair things really are for him: how he gets stuck with a smelly, non-verbal mom; how humans just don't understand his language or intentions; how ugly, old Hrothgar gets a beautiful queen while Grendel has to kill goats for fun. The list of injustices could go on.
Perhaps the greatest insult to universal fairness is what happens the first (and last) time Grendel encounters Beowulf. Apparently, the hero isn't going to play by the rules—and this puts Grendel off his game. When Grendel slips in some of his own blood and realizes that Beowulf's handshake is the least friendly he's ever felt, it seems to confirm something that the Shaper's been saying all these years: Grendel really is cursed.
Resolution (Denouement)
Into the Forest Once More
Hey, it's almost poetic justice: after twelve years of taking stuff from Heorot, Grendel finally leaves a little bit of himself behind.
We're talking about his arm, of course. Not to mention his life.
Things now become clearer for Grendel and for us. That ghastly vision of the roots of the oak tree and the abyss below it become reality as he trips on oak tree roots and turns to the see the blankness of eternity opening out before him.
Gardner's working some serious literary magic here: it's like he's combing that magical, metaphysical landscape from Grendel's dreams with the real landscape, thus making the two kind of hard to tell apart. We really get the sense that Grendel's got one foot (arm?) in the grave.
All of the positive energy Grendel might have had (okay, probably not a lot), any strength he ever had to fight against the philosophy of the dragon dies before Grendel himself does. He realizes that the crazy worm was right: every living thing is an insignificant blip in the face of eternity.
That's what Grendel thinks, anyway. There's pretty much just one thing left for him to do: curse everybody.
The end.