Sir Bedivere

Bedivere is the witness of Arthur's ending — the one knight who was there when it was over, and who had to bear both the doing of it and the telling. In Malory's Morte d'Arthur, after the final battle at Camlann where Arthur is mortally wounded, he commands Bedivere to take Excalibur to the nearest water and throw it in, then report what he sees.

Twice Bedivere cannot bring himself to cast the sword away — it is too precious, too storied, too much the king himself. Twice he hides it and returns to say he saw only wind and water. Twice Arthur knows he is lying. On the third try Bedivere hurls the sword as far as he can, and a hand and arm rise from the water, catch it, brandish it three times, and pull it under. He carries Arthur to the shore where three queens receive him onto a barge bound for Avalon.

Bedivere then does something remarkable: he lives on. The other knights are dead, dispersed, or disappeared into hermitage. Bedivere goes to a hermitage himself, but he is there when Lancelot arrives years later, and he tells the story. He is the only Arthurian knight whose function is memory — the man who knew how it ended, and stayed to say so.