Three Works Based on Quests

This study will compare three works based on quests---John bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Samuel Johnson's The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia. The study will argue that Johnson's book most accurately portrays the human condition, that Bunyan's book is fairly good but less accurate, and that the anonymous author of Sir Gawain depicts the human condition most inaccurately of the three.

By "accurate" this reader means not necessarily true, for Bunyan's Christian allegory may, after all, be true. However, the "human condition" includes far more non-Christians than Christians, and surely the majority cannot be considered outside of that condition. By "accurate" picture of the human condition, then, it is meant here a picture which most realistically portrays what the average human being finds in the world as he or she goes about his or her own quest, self-discovery, relationship with the world and others, etc.

The quest of Rasselas as depicted by Johnson, then, is most accurate because it is most down-to-earth. The human condition is first of all human, which means that it is a condition shaped by what happens to the human being on a day-to-day basis, what he or she does, thinks and feels in relation to the world around him, which is most often mundane.

Using such a standard in measuring the accuracy of the quest for individual meaning and identity in human life, it is obvious that the quest of Sir Gawain is absurdly unrealist

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Christian and the evangelist, for example, Christian is warned that straying from the path of righteousness once will be forgiven, but "take heed that thou turn not aside again, lest thou perish from the way when [the keeper at the Gate's] wrath is kindled but a little" (Bunyan 24). In fact, human beings are so full of defects and shortcomings that only by the grace of an infinitely forgiving and merciful God would any single human soul ever enter Heaven. Bunyan, however, cannot come to such a conclusion because an important part of his book is meant to coerce and frighten the reader into conversion. The adventures of Sir Gawain are so flamboyantly unrealistic and inaccurate that they make Bunyan's quest seem utterly accurate, even mundane. At least the allegorical conversations in Bunyan correspond in some way to the intellectual and spiritual conversations which go on between human beings and in individual minds and souls as we struggle with the great eternal issues of life and death and God. Bunyan puts a dogmatic spin on every exchange which cheats his characters out of realism and accuracy. Still, his people and their adventures in and around the Celestial City ring far more true than those in Sir Gawain. This is not t

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