"John  Gardner's Dramatic Vision of 'Epic Community

Gerald Lee Ratliff

SUNY Potsdam

In a somewhat quixotic way, John Gardner fashions a dramatic vision of epic community in  Grendel that is both entertaining and enlightening. His gifts of characterization, language,, and setting appear to be directed by a collective spirit of humanity and humor which are expressed in universal philosophical terms and directly related to the  author's own social conscience.

To speak of John Gardner 's moral vision of the epic community as it is apparently reflected in the character  Grendel is to voice the tragic transfiguration which marks the end of  Dante's pilgrimage. Here, in the character of  Grendel, is a magnific ent example of  titanism; of the inordinate capacity of beast/man to reach out for the excessive and the extreme, for unlimited knowledge and unlimited  actio, for an all-embracing vision of the universal community that is at once a unification with the core of reality.

In the philosophical tradition of most tragic heroes--Oedipus, Faustus, Prometheus, or even Captain  Ahab--Grendel makes hazardous decisions and takes rebellious action in consequence of them; rebellious action that deliberately challenges a greater moral order outside the universal community. What he finally  apprehends, however, is how inwardly broken and tormented he is. Although he regards himself as infinitely superior to all of the 'superficial' elements of the universal community, he is finally overwhelmed by emptiness: an emptiness so chilling and so exasperating that it calls into question the awful solitude of his own pathetic "presence."