self-deprecating figure, and under his influence adopts from romance, the quest myth turning into a study of self-deception, and the dream of wishfulfilment, transforming it into a nightmare. Under conditions of limited freedom, the central character enjoys an uneasy truce with necessity, and the form gives the impression of being suspended or equivocal on the question of possibilities for change or renewal. The sense of isolation is also reflected, like allowing no freedom and is as closed to the opportunities for change as the prisons and torture chambers the victim inhabits. The romantic hero can destroy the ironic hero or make him incapable for further action. We expect the phases of irony to parody those recurrent events we found in the romantic pattern. In the resolute denial of the meaning of efficacy of tragic fate and comic fortune, denial
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of the meaning of efficacy of tragic fate and comic fortune, and in its insistence on negations and inversions of romantic forms, irony often under the pretense of denying the premises of literary form forces us to reexamine the original principles of literature. But the very force of its opposition its negative imperative becomes a structuring energy. In its antipathy to the assumptions of other modes irony is shaped by the structures it opposes until the denial of convention becomes a convention itself (Foulke and Smith 862-867).
Gawain, Shakespeare, and Shelley, do not let us incur in devious affirmations of our own importance and do not allow us to avoid the complexity of experience.
They use the romance pattern to show us how men’s actions matter in ways our ordinary conceptions of existence cannot