How Does Chaucer Use Satire In The Pardoner's Tale

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When Chaucer wrote his Canterbury Tales he wrote for the people of Europe who didn’t have the formal education and insights into life that he did. Chaucer wrote with a cynical humor that made the people laugh and the people who he wrote about seem like jokes to their professions. He writes about nuns that flirt, friars that sleep around and marries off his brides, a pardoner who preaches his sins for gain, and the man who’s seen it all, the host. His humor is anything from the simplest of sarcastic muses where he mocks the person and their actions like he did the nun who ‘spoke’ French, but they were also crude like the Things the wife of bath said about her husbands. The satire that Chaucer used varies from sarcasm and cynicism to rude and brutal blunt honesty. The Wife of Bath Prologue is the brutal and blunt set of short tales that makes the man seem the fool when his wife played all the cards. The wife’s tale was a play to seem smart, to prove the phrase, “I am the king of this house, and my wife gave me permission to say so.” is true. She told the stories about how she manipulated her husband, mocked him, and put them on a leash. The others in the party, at least the Friar and Pardoner, took these …show more content…

The Pardoner admits that he is not a holy man, despite the things he preaches. He tells that gluttony and pride are deadly sins, gaining money and wealth all the while from the power behind his words. He admits that it is not the right thing, but says that what has he to lose by gaining while he is alive by ‘helping’ others absolve themselves of their sins. “The pardoner is unfortunately so celebrated in literature for the abuses with which he is found associated that his true function within the Church is almost entirely obscured.”

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