It has been widely observed that the ostensibly authoritative moral self-commentary prominent in the first book of The Faerie Queene cannot be relied on to accord with the moral significance we would attribute to the story's events in that commentary's absence. Nor is it merely, as Paul Alpers argues, that the commentary we get en route is “provisional”, “true but incomplete”, but that, as Jerome Dees shows, it appears at least at times to be quite on the wrong track, “falsifying” the significance of what is commented on, actually construing as virtuous what appears on other evidence to be vicious, and so on. The four chapters that follow examine in detail two substantial respects in which Book One skews its apparent significance through self-interpretation. The first is its inclination to treat as so many virtuous achievements the protagonist's early victories in battle; the second, its tendency to ascribe the blame for his mishaps to the disguised enemies he encounters along his way, and above all to Duessa.

For critics who have taken on trust the book's self-interpretation in its first six cantos, the significance of the Redcross knight's early martial victories is that he proves himself superior therein to a series of vices opposed to holiness: to error, faithlessness, and so on. Such a reading implies either, as John Ruskin supposed, that Redcross embodies his titular virtue throughout the story, or, as F. M. Padelford influentially argued, that he acquires it step by step along the way, in the very act of defeating his foes.