Grendel: Chapter 5

Man this is one confusing chapter!!! I had to read it twice and I still don’t get it all.

Summary

• Grendel seeks help from the Dragon in his lair. He sits on “his treasure hoard.”
• Bats are mentioned: The cave is “alive with them.”
• The dragon speaks in “a voice that might have come from an old man.” He was expecting Grendel.
• He tells Grendel to stand to his side because he gets “a cough sometimes.” HAAA!!! He chuckles at his own joke.
• The dragon pats Grendel’s head as if he is a pet.
• He asks Grendel if he knew before that his appearance would scare men. Grendel says he did not know.
• The dragon laughs “horrible” and obscene.”

Summary

• The dragon will not stop laughing and this pisses Grendel off. He picks up a large gem to throw t the dragon.
• The dragon tells Grendel not to touch his things and he looks right at Grendel with fire coming from his nostrils.
• Grendel wants to learn from him but now the dragon is in a foul mood.
• Grendel tells him that he has decided to stay away from man, except for eating one now and then. He doesn’t want to scare man.
• The dragons asks, “Why not frighten them?”
• The dragon says that he knows everything and he gets angrier at Grendel.

Summary

• “Frail, foolish, flicker, flash” What is this someone?
• Grendel feels as if he is falling, dying.
• The dragon tells Grendel to “seek out gold.”
• Grendel asks why he should do that to man, and this makes the dragon angrier. Bats fly from the ceiling.
• Grendel then asks about the Shaper and the Dragon replies, “Illusion.”
• The dragon again says that he knows everything: “The beginning, the present, the end.”
• He calls Grendel a “low creature,” but Dragons have a whole different kind of mind.
• He says that “Predestination” rules and that there is no “free will.” Everything is a cycle. Everything will end/die.

Summary

• He says that men don’t relly think. They just think they do.
• “That’s where the Shaper saves them. Provides them an allusion of reality.” But all else is “tripe.” (that’s the gross stomach stuff in menudo).
• The Shaper, he says, provides men with a false belief of “god” and “heaven.”
• “Time and Space”: This part was HARD!!! He says a second in time does nothing to what happens in 1000 years. It is all predetermined.
• Grendel appears disinterested in the discussion… kind of like some of you now.
• The dragon says he is interested in nothing but “excitement, violence.” Kind of like all of you one your phones right now.

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Summary

• The dragon says that life relies on “frustrations of established order” and “conformity.”
• Grendel is still lost. Grendel thinks that the dragon is telling him “gibberish” and “babble.”
• The dragon makes it easy for him. He says, “Things come and go.” In a billion years, things will all be different.
• Nothing matters. It’s all “boobies, hemorrhoids, boils, slaver” which is drool.
• He says that it all will end with an appocolypse set off “accidentally by man.”
• Grendel thinks that he is lying. He wants to know why he can’t change his ways, “improve [his] ways.”

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Summary

• The dragon says that he does improve man. He “stimulates them.” He “makes them think and scheme.”
• He says that Grendel needs “to scare them to glory.”
• He mocks Grendel by telling him that he should go “help the poor. Feed the hungry.”
• Then Grendel tells the dragion what the Shaper said: That gods created the world.
• The dragon says that there are no gods.
• He ends by telling Grendel to “go seek gold and sit on it.”