Grendel struggles with communication and understanding others due to his inability to use language. He observes the organized society of humans but cannot truly comprehend them. As a young creature, Grendel had a close bond with his mother but grew to see them as separate as he matured. Grendel's heavy reliance on empiricism and struggle to understand others leads him to the solipsistic view that he alone exists and creates the entire universe through his own experiences and resistance to the world.

1. Chapter 2 "I alone exist”

2. Central Themes/ Motifs The Bull Communication Maturing WoK: Animals and Humans Solipsism

3. Taurus From the Astrology Encyclopedia by James R. Lewis ©1994 Visible Ink Press, London Second Sign of the Zodiac Feminine Ruled by Planet Venus Represented by a bull’s head and horns Traits: Bullheaded, stubborn, domestic , proud, quick-tempered, self-indulgent, sensual, persistent, thorough, discriminating, determined, argumentative, materialistic Associated with the throat and neck, and hence the voice Key phrase: “I have”

5. Grendel’s Mindset- Maturing Asserts that youth is a passing phase of stupidity Originally conceives his mom and himself as one Associates love with weakness and physical violence: emotional connotation of words like “seize” and “smash” Cannot understand his meaning to his mother, cannot “know” what she knows due to lack of language Concieves his mom and himself as seperate “I lived those years, as do all young things, in a spell.” Pg 16 “We were one thing, like the wall and the rock growing out from it.” Pg 17 “I would feel, all at once, alone and ugly, almost- as if I’d dirtied myself- obscene… Being young, unable to face these things, I would bawl and hurl myself at my mother and she would reach out her claws and seize me…and she would smash me to her fat limp breast” pg 17 “I was, in her eyes, some meaning I myself could never know and might not care to know: an alien, the rock broken free of the wall” pg 23

7. “thinking creatures, pattern makers, the most dangerous things I’d ever met.” Pg 27

8. “the world snapped into position around [the bull]” Pg 19

9. “he fought by instinct , blind mechanism ages old.” Pg 21

10. “dull mechanical bull” Pg. 27Reason, Authority Instinct/intuition

11. Grendel Empirically Knowing “Thing after thing tried, cynical and cruel , to foist itself off as my mama’s shape- a black rock balanced at the edge of the cliff, a dead tree casting a long armed shadow.” Pg 19 “I listen to the underground river. I have never seen it.” Pg 29 Show’s Grendel’s heavy reliance upon empiricism as a WoK

12. Solipsism From The University of Tennessee at Martin’s Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy “Solipsism” Article at http://www.iep.utm.edu/solipsis/#H1 “Solipsism is sometimes expressed as the view that “I am the only mind which exists,” or “My mental states are the only mental states.” “ “However, the sole survivor of a nuclear holocaust might truly come to believe in either of these propositions without thereby being a solipsist. Solipsism is therefore more properly regarded as the doctrine that, in principle, “existence” means for me my existence and that of my mental states.” “The foundations of solipsism lie at the heart of the view that the individual gets his own psychological concepts (thinking, willing, perceiving, and so forth.) from “his own cases,” that is by abstraction from “inner experience.””

13. Grendelthe Solipsist “pale skin of words that closes me in like a coffin, not in a language that anyone any longer understands” pg 15 “I understood that the world was nothing: a mechanical chaos of casual, brute enmity 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… I create the whole universe- an ugly god pitifully dying in a tree!” pg 22 “The world resists me , and I resist the world… I exist, nothing else.” Pg 28

14. The Problem With Solipsism ” The final presupposition underlying solipsism, that all experiences are necessarily (that is logically) private to the individual whose experiences they are… Wittgenstein distinguishes two senses of the word “private” as it is normally used: privacy of knowledge. Something is private to me in the first sense if only I can know it privacy of possession. It is private to me in the second sense if only I can have it. Thus the thesis that experience is necessarily private can mean one of two things: (a) only I can know my experiences or (b) only I can have my experiences. Wittgenstein argues that the first of these is false and the second is true in a sense that does not make experience necessarily private”

15. Taurus and Solipsism Key Taurus phrase “I have” Key Solipsism phrase “I alone exist”, “I control/create the whole universe” Very much connected. In the solipsist’s world: