There are many possible reasons why John Gardner chose Grendel to be the narrator of Grendel. The character Grendel is a monster who is an outcast from Hrothgar’s kingdom, and Gardner tries to write the novel from the view of someone looking at human society from the outside. While an omniscient third person narrator might be able to accomplish this to some degree, a first person experience shows what Grendel went through as a monster much more elaborately and personally. Gardner also intended to show various philosophical views through the narration of his novel, and because Grendel is the character that undergoes the most growth mentally, he is the best choice for the narrator. By using Grendel as the narrator Gardner gets to express the different philosophical views with much more detail and personality as compared to how he would have been able to do it through a third person perspective.
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