Sir Gawain and Perfectionism

I've been grading tests on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and as I've been reading the responses, I've been thinking about what the poem seems to say about perfectionism. Forgive me if I've posted something similar before. I suppose that it seems to me that the root of Gawain's failure (or what he perceives as failure, the other characters don't) is his own perfectionism. Gawain finds himself in a situation in which, by his own standards, standards imposed by himself alone, there is no good solution. In this sense, the work even seems to harken forward to postmodernism--the sense that there's no right answer to Gawain's delimma. And yet, the other characters both his adversaries and Arthur's court see him as ultimately successful. He's the only one who perceives himself to be a failure. Although I'm not articulating this very clearly, what I mean to say is that maybe the lesson here is that we perfectionists would do well to remember that humans are not perfect and would do well to see ourselves as other see us.

I don't know; maybe I'm not making a lot of sense. I do know what perfectionism is something that I think about and am affected by far too often.