Contradictions In The Pardoner's Tale

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Exemplums and Contradictions in Canterbury Geoffrey Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales in the late 1300s and early 1400s, during the medieval times in Southwark, England. Chaucer observed people contradicting their overall behavior and the societal expectations during this time. In response, he decided to write The Canterbury Tales. These tales consist of twenty-nine people going on a pilgrimage to the shrine of Saint Thomas a Beckett. One of the characters, the Host, creates a competition to see who has the best story with a moral to tell. Chaucer invents this framed story to create irony in the story since most of the characters contradict themselves. The Canterbury Tales do a very good job at including an explanation of the stories, examples …show more content…

His story details three young rioters that decide to murder Death. Immediately the story begins with visible dramatic irony due to the fact that the readers clearly know that the three men will never be able to kill Death and that it is impossible to do so. As the tale continues, the men come upon an old man in which the readers come to learn that he is Death’s spy. The men, not knowing of the old man’s connection to Death, made fun of him. The old man then warns them that he has lived a long life, tells them to be kind to their elders as it says in the Bible and to have God be with them. He then shows them the way to Death, in which they follow, but stop when they come upon a pile of gold. The Rioters decipher a plan to take the gold and split it between themselves. The reader then learns that all of the men make plans to murder the others in order to get more gold as a response to their own avarice. In the end, the rioters kill each other and the gold is left without an owner. In the Pardoners story, Chaucer says that the moral is that money is the root of all …show more content…

One source called “Audience and Exemplify in the ‘Pardoner's Prologue and Tale’” by A. Luengo states that the tale told by the pardoner, “would appear perhaps to be beating a dead horse.”(Luengo) Meaning that the whole story was redundant due to the fact that the Pardoner would not be changing his actions even though he is aware he is not being morally just. Luengo also quotes a writer who also analyzed this tale and stated, “part of it is reported, in satiric vein, to another kind of audience that is listening not so much to the homily as to the self-revelation.” (Luengo) Chaucer, in the beginning of this tale, decided intentionally to create a character who was not only self aware but also still unwilling to change his ways so that the irony of the overall story as well as the tale would be visible to the reader and add another layer to his framed story. This idea is also investigated in “The Moral Superiority of Chaucer’s Pardoner” written by Charles

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