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''Grendel'' is a 1971 novel by American author John Gardner. It is a retelling of part of the Old English poem ''Beowulf'' from the perspective of the antagonist, Grendel. In the novel, Grendel is portrayed as an antihero. The novel deals with finding meaning in the world, the power of literature and myth, and the nature of good and evil. In a 1973 interview, Gardner said that "In ''Grendel'' I wanted to go through the main ideas of Western Civilization – which seemed to me to be about . . . twelve? – and go through them in the voice of the monster, with the story already taken care of, with the various philosophical attitudes (though with Sartre in particular), and see what I could do, see if I could break out".〔Joe Don Bellamy & Pat Ensworth, "John Gardner", in ''Conversations With John Gardner'', Allan Chavkin, ed., University Press of Mississippi, 1990, p.10〕 On another occasion he noted that he "us() Grendel to represent Sartre's philosophical position" and that "a lot of ''Grendel'' is borrowed from sections of Sartre's ''Being and Nothingness''.〔Barry Silesky, ''John Gardner: Literary Outlaw'', Algonquin Books, 2004, p.165〕 ''Grendel'' has become one of Gardner's best known and reviewed works. Several editions of the novel contain pen and ink line drawings of Grendel's head, by Emil Antonucci. Ten years after publication, the novel was adapted into the 1981 animated movie ''Grendel Grendel Grendel''. ==Background== The basic plot derives from ''Beowulf'', a heroic poem of unknown authorship written in Old English and preserved in a manuscript dating from around AD 1000. The poem deals with the heroic exploits of the Geat warrior Beowulf, who battles three antagonists: Grendel, Grendel's mother, and, later in life, an unnamed dragon. Gardner's retelling, however, presents the story from the existentialist view of Grendel, exploring the history of the characters before Beowulf arrives. Beowulf himself plays a relatively small role in the novel, but he is still the only human hero that can match and kill Grendel. The dragon plays a minor part as an omniscient and bored character, whose wisdom is limited to telling Grendel "to seek out gold and sit on it"; his one action in the novel is to endow Grendel with the magic ability to withstand attacks by sword (a quality Gardner found in the original). Gardner himself explained that his Grendel character is modeled on Jean-Paul Sartre, with whom Gardner claimed to have a love-hate relationship: "he's a horror intellectually, figuratively, and morally, but he's a wonderful writer and anything he says you believe, at least for the moment, because of the way he says it....What happened in Grendel was that I got the idea of presenting the Beowulf monster as Jean-Paul Sartre, and everything that Grendel says Sartre in one mood or another has said". 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Grendel (novel)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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