Gavin Rualo, Period 2, 3/10/23

 Creativity & Fiction

• Craft a piece of FAN fiction related to any of the reading we’ve done in class that addresses one or more of the following: 

• Literary elements (i.e. structure, tone, diction, mood, irony, and figurative language) to craft a narrative.

• Structural features of drama (stage directions, character attributions/tags, dialogue, monologues, and/or soliloquies) to craft a script.

• Multidimensional characters to develop themes and create socio-political metaphors.

The dragon sits in its lair, atop the mountain of gold. Beowulf enters alone.

Beowulf: Detestable creature. Hoarder of riches, spinner of lies, and destroyer of men, I have come to slay you.

Dragon: The hero among heroes, he who conquered Grendel. 

The dragon sneers at Beowulf, completely unafraid.

Beowulf: I’ve waited long for this moment. The chance to rid this world of you, blight, who steals from and kills my people.

Dragon: How unfortunate for you. I haven’t exactly had to wait. I’ve known this moment was coming, I know what comes after, and I know that you indeed succeed today in killing me.

The dragon remains laying on its gold, even more aloof than before.

Beowulf: If you know so much, why do you not flee? Why are you not afraid of me? And why, all-knowing beast, do you use your knowledge to plunder materials only useful to humans?

Dragon: A human who slogs through time in a line will never grasp the actions of one who knows the birth and end of the world, of their own life and death. In my mind, I have not fled from you, and therefore I can’t. There is no meaning in my having fear, either. Humans fear the unexpected or the dangerous. Every bit of my life is telegraphed, and danger has lost its meaning when I’ve had eternities to come to terms with every setback, every injury, including my death. As for the gold…

Beowulf attempts to pick up a coin to examine it

Dragon whips at Beowulf with its tail

Dragon: Stop that! My gold is all that I’ve found in life. True, that I have no use for it. But the allure of its luster is not only visible to humans. Perhaps, I have a bit of humanly desire in me. Or perhaps that bit of desire is just another piece in the tragic machine that is an omniscient being. 

Beowulf: Omniscient? Perhaps not omniscient enough to stop me from picking up a piece of your precious treasure. 

Dragon: My eyes afford me sight into time. They do not give me reason for what I see, nor do they grant me any hope of escaping my vision. You picked up the coin, and so it was. What I see is fate. What you’ll say next is fated too. Fated is my death and yours. I am powerless to stop either, bound by no constraints you’d consider physical. Time itself, that which nearly exists as space to me, is what sets me along my path.

Beowulf arrogantly scoffs.

Beowulf: You poor thing, locked in your prison of thought. Even if you can’t see reason, you can see action. You believe my death is set in stone, exactly how you imagine it. I’m no fool, I know my time will come. But if I decide to kill you and then myself right now? 

Dragon: But you didn’t. You aren’t. You won’t. And if you did, that would’ve been what I had seen. My presence locks in your story and my own, as well as the stories of everyone who ever was or will be.

Beowulf: And your proof? In this very moment, how do you know that all of the times your “foresight” was correct, it wasn’t you convincing yourself that you had predicted it all from the beginning. There is no verification of the past other than yourself; you cannot trust your memories. Excuse me, you don’t believe they’re memories—but how can you ever be sure? There would be no way to prove a difference between one who truly lives in the past and present at once and one who simply believes it to be true.

The dragon pauses for a moment. Not a hesitation of stupor, instead, contentness, finally able to answer this question it has anticipated its whole life.

Dragon: I don’t need proof, young one. My existence does not depend on whether I am right, or whether I believe in what I see. My existence is completely up to me. I believe I exist, but what does it mean for life to exist? A machine capable of complex thought is still a lifeless box of metal and wires. Nonetheless, it exists. Whether you believe in my foresight matters not. Our battle will come and go, and I’ll be the one freed from the prison of thought. So free me, Beowulf. Be the one who continues to spin as a cog, a machine yourself. Like me, you’re imprisoned by the knowledge of fate, as are all humans, though at least many of the others are deluded by the walls of their paradise. As one of the few who can see the walls, you’re among the most tragic existences. Especially because here, you end me and condemn yourself.

The dragon presents its neck, defenseless for the first time. Beowulf steps forward and claims his glory. 

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Afterword: 

Using the last few lessons, especially the point with Beowulf’s parallels to the dragon, I wanted to depict this interaction not present in Gardner’s interpretation. In Beowulf’s final encounter with Grendel, the former is the one that takes much more of a determinist stance, that none of the current events are an accident. Along with this determinism falling in line with the dragon’s vision into time, certain aspects of Beowulf’s character were similar from Grendel’s perspective. The dragon was the first being to make Grendel feel and understand visceral fear, whereas Beowulf can be seen as Grendel’s ultimate desire, who eventually forces Grendel to yield and understand the perspective of a human in a world of monsters. Thus, I felt a comparison between Beowulf’s and the dragon’s nihilistic perspectives was in order.

As Gardner points out in his letter to Susie West and her students, the dragon’s philosophy truly was that “nothing matters, so do whatever you’d like”. This is a product of knowing every detail of time and space, but is a different brand from what Beowulf expresses. Beowulf’s goal is more aligned with finding meaning yourself, as the iconic “Sing walls!” line implied that everyone has the power to shape the world around them. In the end, I’ve kept consistent that Beowulf kills the dragon, though in this interpretation, the dragon feels much more like the winner. My version of the dragon is not completely consistent with Gardner’s, centrally because I feel that Gardner’s interpretation of an omniscient being is incorrect. I bring up “machines” a few times within this dialogue, which is much closer to what I believe an omniscient being would feel like. One who knows exactly what they’re going to get essentially becomes a machine to themself because the process of “thought” becomes fake. In the same way I know that if I drop a glass on the floor, it’ll break, an omniscient being like the dragon would know exactly what would occur in every instance. The illusion of thought is included in this, as thoughts are nothing more than electrical signals caused by stimuli. Of course, a mythical being such as a dragon may work differently, which is why I still chose for the dragon to show a lapse in this type of behavior, shown when it does not prevent Beowulf from picking up one of the gold coins.

The ending in which the dragon “escapes the prison of thought” falls into this line of thinking as well. A being who lives in all of time at once also knows what all of their thoughts are going to be, and that there is no hope to change any bit of it once it has been foreseen. The dragon is constrained the most, as it actually knows its fate, though Beowulf is certainly constrained in a similar way simply by believing in fate. Though he is skeptical of the dragon’s omniscience, questioning its sanity, he displays his belief in fate in the final encounter with Grendel, and therefore understands a bit of the plight the dragon is going through as a prison of predetermination. After this story, the humans not involved continue to live their lives of delusion, not privy to the events of the future and therefore not trapped into their destinies. Beowulf must continue to slog through time, chipping away at the days, unable to find meaning in his own life. The dragon, finally dead, unfortunately still exists in the past. As a being who perceives time differently, that may also mean an eternal prison that inevitably ends in its death each time.