IN THE FIRST half of the Legend of Holiness, the canto arguments and the ipronouncements of the narrator are certainly amongst the most conspicuously unreliable of the poem's self-interpreting voices. But it is not sufficient to regard them as doing the whole or even the chief work of misrepresenting the story's moral significance. That remains the case, even if we ascribe to the narrator not only such reflective commentaries as appear at canto openings, but equally, moral valuations attributable to the storytelling voice which occur in the forward stream of the narrative itself. For as I mean to show, it is not merely such ‘external’ valuations of the protagonist's actions as are attributed to the narrating voice that present difficulties to our making consistent moral sense of his early adventures, but likewise the allegorical interpretation of his encounters intrinsic to the narrative events themselves. Moreover, the much-noted unreliability of the narrator proves to be a secondary phenomenon, an extension of the story's own dubious self-interpretative regime rather than a gratuitous imposition of a misinterpretation on the story's action from without.