Comparing the moral superiority of Grendel and Frankenstein Seeking friends, they found enemies; looking for hope, they found hate. Social outcasts simply want to live like the rest of us live. Often, in our prejudice against their species, we banish them from our elite society. Regardless of our personal perspective, society judges who is acceptable and who is not. Some of the greatest people of all time have been socially unacceptable. Van Gogh found solace only in his art and in a woman who constantly denied his passion. Edgar Allen Poe was considered "different" - to put it mildly. These great men, like Grendel and Frankenstein, do not “fit” into society. Furthermore, like these men, Grendel and Frankenstein are uniquely superior to the rest of humanity. Their superiority is seen through the cunning of living in a society that ostracizes their species, their true heroism in place of society's romantic vision, and the ignorance upon which society's opinion of them is formed. Grendel, even though he needs to kill to do so, works very well in his sphere. Grendel survives in a hostile climate where he is hated and feared by all. He lives in a cave protected by fire serpents in order to separate himself physically, as well as spiritually, from the society that detests him, but at the same time admires him. Grendel is “the existing brute through whom [humanity] learns to define itself” (Gardner 73). Hrothgar's thanes continually seek to quench Grendel's infernal rage, while he simply wishes to live in harmony with them. Like Grendel, Frankenstein also learns to live in a society that despises his kind. Frankenstein also has to kill, but this is only in response to people's dislike of him. Ironically, the same doctor who bored him now scours the world in search of Frankenstein's destruction. Even the ever loving father figure now distances himself from this social outcast. Frankenstein travels to the ends of the earth to escape the social evils that cause society to hate him. He ventures to the harshest, most desolate and uninhabitable place known to man, the North Pole. He lives in isolation, in the cold acceptance of frozen glaciers. However, Doctor Frankenstein follows him, pushing his creation to the edge of the world, hoping it will fall, never to be seen or heard from again. Frankenstein flees from his father until the Doctor's death, where Frankenstein joins his father in perpetual, silent acceptance of death.