A dream, as we understand it in modern thought, is considerably different from the dreams that featured in Middle English dream vision poetry. While today we might generally view dreams as an abstract, introspective reflection of individual and personal psychology, the dream in The Pearl of the Poet Gawain functions differently. As AC Spearing explains, "For the Middle Ages, the explicitly visionary element of Scripture must have provided a major justification for a literature of dreams and visions", implying that the dream is not just the reflection of a man's psychology, but that the dream, like the Bible, offers lessons or understanding to its readers. Furthermore, the dream world the dreamer enters into is completely unknown and alien, and the resulting narrative is an unstable one that he cobbles together to try to understand his experience for himself. If we view "narrative" as the way in which experiences are given in literature and communicated to readers, I will argue that Pearl's readers are not required to renounce narrative altogether, but rather to trust in one that is spontaneous and perhaps unreliable, as they enter the afterlife of the unknown dream alongside the narrator, sharing the same "familiar world of everyday values ​​and assumptions" as he does. The "major part of the poem", as Ad Putter explains, is "the debate between the Dreamer and the Pearl Girl", and it is the dreamer's account which exposes his continuing misunderstandings about the nature of loss and loss. the beyond, revealing the limits of knowledge and the earthly body. As mortals, the readers operate on the same level as the dreamer, and his narrative is an attempted process toward a retrospective understanding of what the Pearl is attempting to divulge. This process is one that continually triggers, then ultimately fails when the dreamer physically crosses a boundary and wakes up. Such a narrative constitutes the reader's feeling of incompleteness and frustration at the end of the poem, wishing, like the dreamer, to be able to know or see more, but realizing through his errors and reflective limitations why this is so, improved through understanding the work of God. functioning.Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay It becomes clear to readers that it is at the moment when the dreamer falls asleep and the earth is left behind that he is guided through the poem of an uncertain narrator through an unfamiliar landscape: “In auenture ther meruaylez meuen./I ne wyste in bis worlde quere bat hit wace”.[64-5] The word “auenture” used here has been the subject of numerous scientific works. discussion, because in Middle English usage it seems more closely linked to the notion of accident or chance rather than the quest or epic journey as we would define it today. From the beginning of the poem, this word therefore signals that the narrator's dream is not the ordinary kind that readers can experience every night, but a dream that readers are as likely to have stumbled upon by chance as the dreamer. ; a dream of promised importance. This impression is made all the clearer by the dreamer's navigation through the unfamiliar landscape of his dream, which, imitating the experience of earthly dreams, begins very slowly, as the dreamer becomes absorbed in the visual beauty that surrounds it. He moves from line 75, when he sees the woods, “holtewodez,” to line 98 when he actually reaches them, “bat frith ber Fortwne for me fairez,” forcing readers to share his dreamlike meander. Which is also particularlyinteresting in this distance is the syntactic change it produces, from “holtewodez” to “fryth”. While "fryth" is translated as "wood" by both Casey Finch and the Middle English Dictionary, "holtewodez" translates slightly differently in both cases as "forest". Such a difference, although subtle, arouses the reader's distrust of the dreamer's story because what he perceives does not remain stable. The stanza following line 98 is doubly puzzling in its sense of movement, where the dreamer first describes being led "onward" [98] by fortune, then venturing into it, "I'm leaving in any case" [101] and finally, wandering towards the river, "I want to have a watering hole near the shore".[107] What is clear from this linguistic confusion is that the narrator and the readers who follow him are located in a realm entirely separate from the earth, and in the tiny stumbles of the dreamer's narrative, the reader is pushed toward the expectation that the senses and mortal perceptions cannot exist. We can rely on the experience of vision. However, in saying this, the first part of the narrative is also somewhat misleading in the suggestion that the dreamer, upon falling asleep, leaves his physical body behind: "From where my spyryt leapt into space;/My body on balke ber bod'.[61-2] Here, body and mind are separated by even separate lines, the word "jumped" implying a sudden and rapid movement. Despite this, it becomes clear, when the dreamer attempts to describe his vision, that his bodily limitations cannot be shaken, preventing both his and the readers' ability to fully access the landscape: "More of wele watz in bat wyse / ben je cowbe tel bag I tom hade,/For vrbely herte my3t not enough/To be tenbe dole of bo gladnez glade.'[133-6] The stanza beginning with these lines sets up a linear deception, where the narration of the dreamer offers a brief glimpse of the otherworldly landscape, "More of wele watz in bat wyse", only for the next line to falter, "ben I cobe tele bag I tom hade", realizing he is unable to communicate his experience. This happens again a few lines later where the dreamer sees paradise, “Forby I bobt bat paradise”[137] then states that it is out of reach, “ouer gayn bo bonkez brade. »[138] Nick Davis, on narrators. in the poet Gawain's work, he comments that they "attempt to make their experiences understandable by putting them together in a way which they find convincing but which also proves wholly or partially inadequate." This seems to be what is happening here with the dreamer, as he struggles to make sense of his own experience through the narrative, thus making it even more difficult for readers to make sense of it. As mentioned above, we readers quickly learn that this incomplete access to the landscape of vision is due to the dreamer's bodily limitations, where he recognizes his "vrbely herte"[135] as guilty, and then is prevented from crossing the river . out of mortal fear, “for wo ber welez as Wynne wore”.[154] It is the dreamer's unwavering mortality that betrays him both and renders him capable of telling readers only partially. Where the dreamer cannot be blamed for the mere habitation of a mortal body, misunderstandings arise from sources other than this. The dreamer presents us with an interaction between him and the Pearl in which she attempts to explain to him how the sky works, while he, in Davis's words, "tries to understand what the pearl is to him now." This understanding or apprehension is limited to both the dreamer and the reader, not only because of the body, but also because of earthly knowledge and logic. As Casey Finch points out in his introduction to the poem, "the heavenly order [...] is undoubtedlystructured like the worldly order,” a fact that makes understanding difficult for the dreamer in several parts of the poem, creating even more narrative “journeys.” . For example, the Pearl tells the dreamer that she was raised as Queen of the Lamb among many others, and the dreamer's earthly hierarchical understanding makes this almost impossible to understand: "we did not feed two men in our bed […] Bot a queen! – Hit means having a date.' The dreamer, attached to his earthly logic, cannot believe that the Pearl, who was only two years old on earth, could have achieved the status of queen. As readers sharing the same mortal logic as the dreamer, it is not difficult to empathize and share his confusion and difficulties in understanding, once again creating the feeling that the narrators, and therefore the readers, don't really understand something important. There are, I would argue, levels at which the dreamer's account actually pushes the reader to a fuller (although not complete) understanding of the vision than the narrator himself can achieve. Although, as I have argued, the dreamer's account of his experience is the vehicle of understanding for readers, a point of separation appears where the dreamer feels the pangs of grief, where readers do not not. At the beginning of the poem, the Pearl is already lost; readers have no emotional investment or attachment to the Pearl as a figure on earth, unlike the dreamer. This fact divides understanding and the dreamer cannot voluntarily accept that his pearl continues to live in the kingdom of heaven, obsessed by its absence from earth: “Sir, be mysente with your story, / To say that your pearl is still absent / the bat is in cofer so comly clente'.[257-9] The Pearl explains that even if she no longer exists on earth, her spirit continues to live in the kingdom of heaven, which the dreamer does not seem not accept because of his feelings of personal loss. This explanation, however, is nothing new to readers who are likely familiar with the Christian doctrine that everyone receives eternal life in heaven. It is therefore at this stage that readers can loosen their ties with the narrator and see his incomprehension. as the product of bereavement. Additionally, by the time the dreamer is about to attempt to cross the river, readers are already aware that this is an ill-advised action because of this, and the dreamer's account is slightly altered to emphasize his mistake: “I’m not fighting against myself here. /To pick me up and take me to a halt/And begin in be strem schulde non me stere'. [1157-9] Although the dreamer has been narrating in retrospect throughout, it is at this point that full clarity appears where it has not been apparent before. The dreamer expresses his regret at his stupidity, “bobt bat nobyng mybt me dere”, understanding in his memories the error he made in crossing this physical boundary. As the narrator acknowledges this transgression, the reader is pushed to understand why he wakes up better than he does himself. Until the very end of his story, he misunderstands the principles and laws of the celestial kingdom, for example when reflecting on which pearl seems most joyful, "Tor to knaw be gladdest chere",[1108] a linguistic failure to see all the queens of the Lamb are equal. Still attached to the narrator's vehicle, readers are prevented from going further into the vision when the narrator wakes up. However, it is their lack of personal judgment that obscures their grief that allows them to see and understand a little further and more clearly than the dreamer, even though it is ultimately clear, as Ad Putter expresses, that " paradise in the pearl […] turns out.’[1198]