Throughout the reading, all I kept thinking of was two quotes
from the movie Inception (see images
below).
We start the story with a great
gathering of King Arthur and his many subjects at a glorious gathering planned
by a guy named Kay. Now for the dream
parts… a knight suddenly confronts Arthur gloating how he has a bunch
of Arthur’s subjects and ‘nyah,
nyah, nyah-nyah, nyah’ he isn’t giving them back, as he leaves he further
challenges Arthur implying ‘Your queen too, I want her as well [crude cough]. Send
your best man (does not need to be the one from your wedding) with the queen,
we fight, and I win and [perverted tongue action and sounds] the queen is now
mine and on the off chance your man wins [whimsically spoken], you get your
people back. [Thinks for a brief moment] Yea, that’s a great bargain for you,
one for many should you win… Bye!’ And
he leaves. So we start at a great
gathering… how did we get here again?
Then some unknown knight makes a challenge and one of your best men want
to leave… if this is not strange, I am not sure what is. Continuing on, the Kay-guy, with Queen in
tow, ventures after the strange knight. Arthur
and his men pack up and chase after Kay who is chasing after the knight. Enough with summing up the sequence of events
at this point and getting more to why all of this is a dream (based on my two
pictures’ quotes):
1)
Kay
is not mentioned or included in the story once his horse is spotted for at
least another 20 pages.
2)
Sir Gawain
gets ahead of everyone else who is also trying to follow Kay and are also
dropped from the story without proper explanation for quite some time.
3)
Sir
Gawain, on his pursuit comes across a knight who has a over-worked and soon to
be dead horse and without inquiring any details or further information (about
the knights’ circumstances or Gawain’s own quest or anything), just gives the
knight one of his horses.
4)
The
horse is dead moments later and Gawain follows the ‘Cart of Shame’ (the human
version of a dog’s ‘Cone of Shame’) which the knight chose to travel in and,
again, does not inquire into what happened.
I mean the knight’s injured and sweaty, his horse died, your horse that
you lent him died, and you’re neither injured nor sweaty… ask some questions
about what happened!!
By the point that
the knight’s ‘outstanding’ bed catches fire and a blade just barely cuts him, I
gave up in trying to understand why all these things were happening and just
came to the conclusion, ‘it’s all a dream!
Nothing is real!’ Correct me if I
am wrong, but is not the whole story one strange occurrence after another? If it is all a dream, who is the
dreamer? The narrator saying that they
were asked to compose the story for someone they had feelings for, or someone
dreaming of the narrator that exists in the story that the narrator is
proposing?
Confused?... Feel like Dr. Mario (above) put you on some trippy drug? Well, you aren't alone!
Yet, at the same time, some of best memories have occurred from moments
like in the story, where my friends and I acted and did things in the spur of
the moment, making decision after decision with no fore-thought. Whether the story is a reality of spurs or a
dream, I leave up to you to make your own opinion… but I am going with dream!
I am not sure I agree with you on this idea that the whole story was a dream, though I thought the points you made in comparison to Inception were interesting. I thought the story, as bizarre as it was, was more about Lancelot and his overcoming of Kay's mistakes. I think that is why Kay was left out of the story so much, because the dimwit made such a massive mistake, and therefore is no longer a part of the story because according to the narrator he is probably too stupid to be able to rectify his mistakes. Also...even though the story was pretty dream like (as you said) I think this merely has to do with the "magical" qualities that so often appear in these stories.
ReplyDeleteI'm with Christen, I don't think the story in itself is meant to be a dream, but merely a ridiculous recount of heroism and questing like all of these romances seem to be. As far as the realm of reality goes within this story, nothing that happens really seems out of the ordinary to them. Jousting is normal, fighting over honor is normal, and encountering dangers randomly while following a footpath is to be expected.
ReplyDeleteSo while I have to disagree that the story is a dream, there are certainly qualities to it that make it seem incredible, but again, those qualities are to be expected in a story of this genre. Were it a dream, I'd expect some more magical or unexplained events, but alas, everything within the story seems to have some explanation, however silly it may be,