Grendel: essential questions, active reading strategies, due dates, and entry/exit tickets

Grendel Essential Questions

How do you create (or find) meaning (or purpose) for your existence?

(Or is existence just existence—a string of purposeless, random, accidental events?)

How do you imagine a better world and work for a better world even though injustice, unfairness, suffering, and the shortness and smallness of life can seem so overwhelming?

How can finding meaning, finding purpose, and working for a better world be made difficult by…

·       being an outsider?

·       discovering the world’s flaws: nature’s (or God’s) apparent indifference, the separateness (alienation) of oneself from other beings, the rewards of human cruelty & deceit?

Active Reading Strategies

·       Use a bookmark (paper folded into thirds) or sticky notes to write down observations, comments, and questions.

·       Look for patterns—repetitions, connections, similarities, contrasts—within the text. Note them.

·       Look for connections to other texts (Beowulf, other first person narratives (like The Catcher in the Rye), Hamlet, Feed, etc.). Note them.

·       Look for connections to your prior knowledge and experiences (schema). Note them.

·       React personally. Note your ideas and feelings. 

Due Dates
Grendel (spring) chapters 1-3 (through p. 45) Due Friday 3/20
Grendel (summer) chapters 4-6 (through p. 90) Due Tuesday 3/24
Grendel (fall) chapters 7-9 (through p. 137) Due Monday 3/30
Grendel (winter) chapters 10-12 (though p. 174) Due Thursday 4/2

You will be need to complete entry tickets based on your reading and notes in order to participate in discussions and activities on each of the due date days. You will also need to complete exit tickets when required.

Grendel Chapters 1-3 [Spring] Lesson Entry Ticket

(In a Google Doc called Grendel.)

3=Explain 3 passages in chapters 1-3 that contribute significantly to John Gardner’s exploration of particular themes in Grendel. Provide page numbers.

One possible theme to consider: the tension between finding meaning in what we see and experience, one hand, and rejecting or debunking meaning because of what we see and experience, on the other hand.

2=Discuss two literary/rhetorical strategies that Gardner uses in the first three chapters. Consider narrative point of view, narrative voice, characterization, symbolic/allegorical imagery, symbolic/allegorical events, allusions, etc.

 1=Write down a question, confusion, mystery that lingers for you and that you’d like to explore further.

Grendel Chapters 1-6 [Spring & Summer] Alternative Entry Ticket

What role do Grendel’s mother, the ancestral shapes, and the cave itself play in developing Grendel’s ideas and the novel’s ideas about the purposefulness or purposelessness of existence? (Matilda G, Madison S, Karina K)

What role do Hrothgar, his men, his expanding kingdom, and his hall play in developing Grendel’s ideas and the novel’s ideas about the purposefulness or purposelessness of existence? (Lukas S, Alex E, Emily R)

What role do the Shaper and his stories play in developing Grendel’s ideas and the novel’s ideas about the purposefulness or purposelessness of existence? (Mikayla H, Ariel M, Natilia W)

What role does the dragon play in developing Grendel’s ideas and the novel’s ideas about the purposefulness or purposelessness of existence? (Gage L, Gina C, Sara F)

What role does Unferth play in developing Grendel’s ideas and the novel’s ideas about the purposefulness or purposelessness of existence? (Erin T, Julia H, Liam C)

What else—including the imagery, the style, and structure—plays a role in developing Grendel’s ideas and the novel’s ideas about the purposefulness or purposelessness of existence? (Josh C, Greer V, Matt G)

[How do different aspects of the novel interrelate to develop Grendel’s ideas and the novel’s ideas about the purposefulness or purposelessness of existence?]

 

 Grendel chapters 1-6 (spring & summer) exit ticket

In order to "exit" the preliminary reading, note taking, writing, and discussion of chapters 1-6 and "enter" back into your social issues work, do the following:

(1) Connect three of the following quotations by discussing meaningful connection(s), (2) identify the chosen quotations by discussing who is speaking, who/what is being discussed, and what is the narrative context for the quotation, and (3) discuss the significance of the quotations in relation to how John Gardner develops ideas about the purposefulness or purposelessness of existence. 

“[She is] guilty . . . of some unremembered, perhaps ancestral crime.”

"...she would smash me to her fat, limp breast as if to make me a part of her flesh again."

"I understood that the world was nothing: a mechanical chaos of casual, brute enimity on which we stupidly impose our hopes and fears. I understood that, finally and absolutely, I alone exist. All the rest, I saw, is merely what pushes me, or what I push against, blindly--as blindly as all that is not myself pushes back."

"I was dealing with no dull mechanical bull but with thinking, creatures, pattern makers, the most dangerous things I'd ever met."

“...a lean, aloof, superior man of middle age. He never spoke to the others except to laugh sometimes—‘Nyeh heh heh.’”

"Terrible threats from the few words I could catch. Things about their fathers and their fathers' fathers, things about justice and honor and lawful revenge--their throats swollen, their eyes rolling like a newborn colt's, sweat running down their shoulders. Then they would fight."

“He’d worked out a theory about what fighting was for…”

"I too crept away, my mind aswim in ringing phrases, magnificent, golden, and all of them, incredibly, lies. What was he? The man had changed the world, had torn up the past by its thick, gnarled roots and had transmuted it, and they, who knew the truth, remembered it his way--and so did I."

"Thus I fled, ridiculous hairy creature torn apart by poetry--crawling, whimpering, streaming tears, across the world like a two-headed beast..."

“He told of an ancient feud between two brothers which split all the world between darkness and light. And I, Grendel, was the dark side, he said in effect. The terrible race God cursed...I had to squeeze with my elbow the corpse of the proof that both of us were cursed, or neither, that the brothers had never lived, nor the god who judged them.”

“‘Like a rabbit!’ he brought out. ‘Nyee he he he! When you’re scared, you look—nyee he he he—exactly…(gasp!) exactly [like a rabbit]’”

"They only think they think. No total vision, total system, merely schemes with vague family resemblance...But they rush across chasms on spiderwebs, and sometimes they make it, and that, they think, settles that!...Simple facts in isolation, and facts to connect them--ands and buts--...But there are no such facts. Connectedness is the essence of everything. It doesn't stop them, of course. They build the whole world out of teeth deprived of bodies to chew or be chewed on."

“‘Things come and go...In a billion billion billion years, everything will have come and gone several times, in various forms. Even I will be gone. . . . A certain man will absurdly kill me... Meaningless, however.’”

“My advice to you, my violent friend, is to seek out gold and sit on it.”

“Whatever I may have understood or misunderstood in the dragon’s talk, something much deeper stayed with me, became my aura. Futility, doom, became a smell in the air, pervasive and acrid as the dead smell after a forest fire--my scent and the world's, the scent of trees, rocks, waterways wherever I went.”

“And now at last the grim laughter came pouring out, as uncontrollable as the dragon’s laugh and I wanted to say, 'Lo, God has vanquished mine enemies!'--but that made me laugh harder...”

 

"I felt a strange, unearthly joy. It was as if I'd made some incredible discovery, like my discovery long ago of the moonlit world beyond the mere. I was transformed. I was a new focus for the clutter of space I stood in: if the world had once imploded on the tree where I waited, trapped and full of pain, it now blasted outward, away from me, screeching terror. I had become myself, the mama, I'd searched the cliffs for once in vain. But that merely hints at what I mean. I had become something, as if born again. I had hung between possibilities before, between the cold truths I knew and the heart-sucking conjuring tricks of the Shaper; now that was passed: I was Grendel, Ruiner of Meadhalls, Wrecker of Kings!"

"And now I was raining apples at him and laughing myself weak...I jumped back and tipped over the table on him, half burying him in apples as red and innocent as smiles...He was crying only a boy, famous hero or not: a poor miserable virgin."

“A hero is not afraid to face cruel truth…. you talk of heroism as noble language, dignity. It’s more than that, as my coming here has proved. No man above us will ever know whether Unferth died here or fled to the hills like a coward. Only you and I and God will know the truth. That’s inner heroism.”

“…I didn’t know how deep the pool was,” he said. “I had a chance. I knew I had no more than that. It’s all a hero asks for.”

“I sighed. The word “hero” was beginning to grate. He was an idiot. I could crush him like a fly, but I held back.

“Go ahead, scoff,” he said, petulant. “Except in the life of a hero, the whole world’s meaningless. The hero sees values beyond what’s possible. That’s the nature of a hero. It kills him, of course, ultimately. But it makes the whole struggle of humanity worthwhile.”

         I nodded in the darkness. “And breaks up the boredom,” I said.

Grendel Chapters 7-12
3-2-1 Entry Ticket

Discuss three new characters from chapters 7-12 in relation to the purposefulness or purposelessness of existence.

Discuss the significance of two literary strategies that Gardner uses; or two motifs, images, symbols, patterns, "again and again" moments that Gardner uses; or two connections between the text and your self, other texts, or the world outside the novel.

Identify (with page numbers) a significant, interesting, but difficult passage and ask an open-ended, discussion question about the passage.