This chapter explores the proposition that narrators and their characters in romance share with their readers a knowing self-awareness of the genres within which they are placed. It focuses upon three Arthurian examples – Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Malory's stories of Sir Gareth and of the Maid of Astolat – to illustrate how writers employ such awareness to complicate and enrich the reader's response.

When a narrator sends a romance knight on a quest, he commits his hero not only to a journey but to a narrative-genre with whose conventions both knight and reader are familiar. Usually the experience will be comfortable for both, the product of a compact of author, narrator, characters, and reader, providing the hero with no opportunity for doubt, hesitation or self-questioning. But romance is at its most challenging when it scrutinizes its own conventions and confronts its characters with situations that expose the limitations of their seemingly secure codes. In this essay I want to contextualize key moments of self-questioning in three narratives – Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Malory's tales of Sir Gareth and of The Maid of Astolat – and consider their significance for the assessment of the characters and their values.