Grendel's Unreliable Narrative

Yes, Grendel is an “unreliable narrator”. A reliable narrator has three main feature which include narrating the plot without interjecting opinion, having an authoritative voice in a narrative, and almost never a character within the story. The narrator, Grendel, break lacks all three of the main components of a “reliable narrator”, which makes him unreliable as a narrator. The first main characteristic of a reliable narrator is narrating a plot without voicing their own opinion. Grendel breaks this rule in the first chapter of the text. The story begins with him explaining his encounter with a ram. Then, he carries on to talk about his hatred for animals with small minds and how he knows he is no better than them. A reliable narrator would have just elaborated on how animals have small minds that consist of lower levels of thinking, rather than describe their personal feelings about the animals and compare themselves. Grendel does this exactly when he says, “Do no think my brains are squeezed shut, like the ram’s...Not, of course, that I fool myself with thoughts that I’m more noble” (6). This shows Grendel’s inability to narrate the plot without interjecting opinion and remaining impersonal. The second main characteristic of a reliable narrator is having an …show more content…
He lacks a sense of order. The order of the chapters of the book are not the order in which the story actually occurred. There is a flashback in chapter two that proves that chapter one is not where the story clearly began. Gardner leaves out a sense of time so that is nearly impossible to accurately put the story together in the correct order. The way the story is writing doesn’t make a sense of time a big of an issue if the reader can’t seem to comprehend it. It also makes sense for a lack of time since the main character is a beast, so they wouldn’t necessarily have a sense of