A Knight of the White Cross: Character Development and Plot

In the Knight of the White Cross you read all about the main character’s experiences. His name is Gervaise. He has gone through a lot of struggles and victories. But in the end he is awarded. During this time in the book, slavery was favored a lot more than freedom. So he experienced being a slavery multiple times. He has also experienced royalty. But, I think throughout all of these different times, he grew from all of them and learned. Instead of treating slaves like dirt, he helped them get through their work much easier. One time he was on a ship and he did not like that he was provided with slaves, so he put an awning over them while they were rowing so that their lives could be easier. He fed them better food as well. Gervaise did that because he knew what it was like. Maybe if everyone during that time experienced what it was like they would understand the struggle and become nicer to the slaves. Or even better, abolish slavery! But that didn’t come into history until much later. Gervaise also had respect towards women. Earlier in the story one young lady gave him a gift. It was some sort of jewelry piece. But he made a promise that he would return it to her by the time he got back from his journey. Unfortunately, he was captured during that journey and became a slave again. If that couldn’t have gotten any worse, the gift was taken from him by the man who captured him. That made things a lot worse.

So throughout this time he was trying to find a way to get back to his home. But he did notice that some of his masters were nice but he still wanted to try his best to escape. He didn’t just escape, but he was able to get the gift back from that man in order to get it back to that lady he met earlier. But it was during this time that she didn’t expect him to go out of his way to keep his promise. When he got back, he was able to deliver the gift back to her. She was very surprised and they soon fell in love. That just showed how much of a gentleman he was. During the whole story he didn’t necessarily “grow” or “develop” because he had the same type of personality throughout the whole story but when you got further into the book it just started to become more obvious.

So the plot around this story revolved mainly about the wars that the people during this time fought. But it also brought along some friendships that were made. I am not a big fan on wars so that was one thing that I disliked about the book. But that is just my personal opinion. That might be interesting to some people but not really to me. So that would probably be the one thing that I didn’t like about the book. But it’s okay if you dislike something about a book, it doesn’t mean that it’s overall bad. Gervaise himself got injured in one of the battles. Thankfully, it wasn’t major. Even though a lot of the story had to do with war, the main character found his partner towards the end of the story, which I thought was a great way to end the book.