Beowulf’s ablist-narrative uses Grendel’s physical disability as a crutch to rhetorically establish the disruptive potential of those that are “different”. Consequently, it is Grendel’s physical manifestation of his disability—his large size, extraordinary strength―that establishes him as a “different” and disruptive element in Beowulf’s narrative; as evidenced in the lines‒“Suddenly then the God-cursed brute was creating havoc; greedy and grim, he grabbed thirty men from their resting places and rushed to his lair, flushed up and inflamed from the raid, blundering back with the butchered corpses” (lines 120-125). To facilitate the narrative’s rhetorical objectives, Grendel’s physical disability is presented as a problem to be solved as demonstrated by Beowulf’s declaration‒“and now against Grendel I am bound, with that terrible creature, alone, to settle the affair with the troll” (lines 425- 428); setting Grendel up as a disruptive force, and as the “cause” for everything that happens from this point on. David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, authors of Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse, calls this “supplementing the void”, which refers to a literary text’s appropriation of disability as a literary/rhetorical device in order to establish the “cause” which gives a narrative momentum. …show more content…
Moreover, they believe that‒” a (literary) narrative issues to resolve or correct a deviance marked as improper to a social context”, and they believe that literature uses disability to serve this purpose