A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms

“He kicked dirt in the hole, then began to fill it methodically, never looking at the thing at the bottom.”

Dunk buries Ser Arlan, his mentor, and is confronted with the reality of death and grief. As he works, he must think of the corpse as a “thing” rather than as a person to keep his grief at bay. At this early stage of the narrative, when Dunk is yet to act in violence as a knight, he shows his naivety through his difficulty in coming to terms with death, establishing his immaturity at the beginning of his coming-of-age journey.

“This is what it means to be a knight.”

Having been knighted, Dunk is technically a knight, yet he still feels unsure of what it entails. He repeats this mantra to strengthen his conviction, highlighting how Dunk is still living under Ser Arlan’s teachings, which remain untested by the real world. He is not yet sure what it means to be a knight, but his conviction helps shape an idealized version of knighthood that he—and a few others—strive to measure up to, establishing the ideals that underpin the theme of The Disparity Between Noble Heritage and Personal Virtue.

“It’s all the pavilion a true knight needs. I would sooner sleep under the stars than in some smoky tent.”

Dunk is coming to terms with his reality of being a hedge knight. In his mind, he has a romanticized version of this profession, in which the suffering and poverty of a hedge knight (compared to a knight in a castle or in service to a lord) is somehow more virtuous.