Analytical Evaluative Novel Questions Essay

Submitted By hey12532
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Final Analytical/Evaluative Novel Questions (50 pts.)

Each of the following questions is geared towards helping you analyze the different elements of your selection and finally evaluate its truth and worth. You’ve already read and reacted to the book, and so this final part is meant to build upon that work. Answer the questions as fully as you can on THIS word document and be sure to use specific short quotes from the text as well as several examples for each question. Each answer should be in BLUE font color. Your answers to these questions will be due on Monday, December 8 turned in on Moodle. A rubric for the assignment is at the bottom.
Analysis:
1. Who is the central character of the book?
Grendel
“I, Grendel, was the dark side.” Pg 51

2. What is the book’s most important event? (i.e. which book is the most life-changing for the central character?)
I’d say the most important and life changing event would be when Grendel died, this is pretty life changing for him because he goes from having a life to not having one.
“I know in advance that I can’t win. Standing baffled, quaking with fear, three feet from the edge of a nightmare cliff, I find myself, incredibly, moving toward it. I look down, down, into bottomless blackness, feeling the dark power moving in me like an ocean current, some monster inside me, deep sea wonder, dread night monarch astir in his cave, moving me slowly to my voluntary tumble into death.” Pg 173
3. Give the book your own title based on #s 1-2, e.g. for John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress – Christian’s Journey to the Celestial City: How an Ordinary Man responded to Evangelist’s invitation by leaving his home and beginning a journey in which he meets various figures that represent biblical truths, faces Apollyon, triumphs over a number of temptations, and finally crosses over the Jordan to glory.
How Grendel got his armed ripped off and died after going head to head with Beowulf and showed good will always prevail.
“The room goes suddenly white, as if struck by lightning. I stare down, amazed. He has torn off my arm at the shoulder! Blood pours down where the limb was. I cry,” pg 172
4. Is the story realistic (real world) or fantastic (a different world or reality)? If realistic, does the author focus on presenting realistic physical detail or rather psychological detail (the way people think, act, feel, etc.)? If the story is fantastic, is the author presenting an allegory or merely speculating about what might be? Does the story seem to have elements of both realistic and fantastic stories?
Grendel is a fantastic story. In it, Grendel, his mother, his hillpit home, and Beowulf’s super human strength all prove that the story is fantastic. The allegory presented is good vs evil. The story’s only realistic views is the location of the Danes.
“I swim up through the firesnakes, hot dark whalecocks prowling the luminous green of the mere, and I surface with a gulp among churning waves and smoke. I crawl up onto the bank and catch my breath. It’s good at first” pg 9
“She would smash me to her fat, limp breast as if to make me a part of her flesh again.”Page 17 “One of them attacked me, dragged me down to the bottom where the weight of the sea would have crushed any other man.” Pg 162
5. What does the central character want? What is standing in his (or her) way? And what strategy does he (or she) pursue in order to overcome this block?
Grendel just wants to terrorize Hrothgar and the Danes and keep a steady food source/entertainment so he wouldn’t have to move. Nothing really stands in his way until Beowulf shows up. He doesn’t overcome this block.

6. What point of view is the story told from? (1st person, 2nd person, 3rd person limited omniscient, 3rd person omniscient) What does the author gain from using this point of view?
The story is in 1st person. The author gains the whole point of the book which is to tell the Beowulf story in the perspective of Grendel.
“I, Grendel, was the dark side.” Pg