"Heroic struggle": A medieval and modern dilemma.

In the medieval tale ofSir Gawain and The Green Knight there is a portrait of an archetypal hero who succumbs to the pressures of living up to his reputation by resorting to behavior which compromises the code of ethics of knighthood. The lives of contemporary men and women are much more complex by comparison, though not always quite so dramatic. The pressures we face on a daily basis are cumulatively greater. Choices we make may be determined by our need to filter the realities of our world through a "characterological lie" which we have fashioned in ourselves as a way of protecting a vulnerable psyche from the truths of existence. Events in this fourteenth-century narrative are reexamined in the light of Dr. Ernest Becker'sThe Denial of Death, which strongly implicates the confrontation between the individual and the environment.