Piers Plowman may seem a chaotic poem, its narrative organized on no better principle than ‘one thought lead to another’. On first reading, it is very difficult to retain even the most basic outline of the plot. Any sense of linear progression through a coherently told story is disrupted by the narrative discontinuities between the dreams and by the poem's use of multiple internal patterning and ordering devices, all of which add to an ensuing sense of narrative fragmentation and dislocation.

Yet there are underlying patterns, and how these patterns are interpreted does, of course, govern any reading of the poem. In this study I start with the premise that the poem is initially, although not exclusively, shaped by the idea of the quest. Piers Plowman begins with the question ‘how may I save my soul?’ This question gives rise to many different debates, questions and anxieties, none of which achieves an easy resolution. Instead, as difficulties proliferate at bewildering speed, answers are deferred, or transformed into new questions. In the process, the familiar ways in which the medieval world was categorized and understood unravel before our eyes, and the very means by which knowledge was known are taken apart.

If we look for smaller narrative patterns within this grand design, they may be found in the way the initial question ‘how may I save my soul?’ is framed and reframed. The narrative moves from the external world of late fourteenth-century England, where the question of salvation is set in a social and collective context, (Prologue–Passus VII) to Will 's inner world and the mental landscape of Passus VIII to XV. Passus XVI–XVII contain Will 's vision of the Tree of Charity and this inner dream serves to collapse some of the distinctions between the inner and outer and the collective and the individual, which have dominated the first two sections of the poem. An account of Christian salvation history follows, culminating in a forecast of the events from the end of time and accompanied by the destruction of the Barn of Unity, which represents the Church on earth.