The Canterbury Tales - The Pardoner’s

Tale

Tarun Bezawada, Eliza Crawford, Asad Dar, Mikayla Johnson, Raffi Mannarelli, Matthew Miller

Ms. Ryal

English 12 Honors

22 October 2014

❖The host is upset by the Physician’s tale, so he asks the group to tell him a

cheerful tale

❖The Pardoner says okay, but wants to eat first.

❖Other pilgrims interject that they would prefer to hear a moral story, and the

Pardoner again says okay.

Introduction to Pardoner’s Tale

Prologue

❖ The Pardoner begins his tale by explaining his hypocrisy in making people pay for fake

forgiveness.

❖ The Pardoner gives sermons in which he takes a bag of fake relics and promises good

fortune from their use.

❖ Despite knowing that he is taking money from the poor, the Pardoner does not feel

remorseful because he’s getting money.

❖ Repetition of “The love of money is the root of all evil.”

The Tale

❖ The story starts out with a lot of emphasis on sin that

three men are committing. Multiple pages are used to

describe their sin.

❖ The four most emphasized sins in the Pardoner’s Tale

are gluttony, cursing, drunkenness, and gambling.

The Tale

❖ The three men are drinking when they find their friend

has died

❖ They vow to find death and defeat him (remember that

they’re drunk)

The Tale

❖ The men meet an old man on their journey to find death

❖ He’s sad because of his old age, and tell them he left

death is under an old oak tree.

The Tale

❖ They walk to the oak tree, but don’t find death

❖ Instead, they find a bunch of gold

The Tale

❖ They agree to send the youngest man into town so they

can wait until night to stealthy carry the gold into town

The Tale

❖ The two remaining men agree to ambush the man who

went to town so they can have the gold for themselves

❖ The man in town fills two of his bottles of wine with

poison for the two men with the gold and one without any

(three total bottles)

The Tale

❖ When the man gets back, the two men stab him to

death, steal his wine, and die from the poison

❖ Everyone has died and no one got the gold

Ironic ending

Immediately after finishing his tale, the Pardoner pulls out his fake relics and

asks people for money so that he may forgive their sins. He used the story as

a warning of sin and greed, and yet engaged in it himself not moments after

his own warning.

Theme in the story

“The love of money is the root of all evil” (Chaucer 513).

This is shown through the repetition of this phrase. The pardoner says this

multiple times.

Symbols

❖ The gold represented greed and death.

❖ The old man represented the passage to death.

❖ The fall of night represented the approach of evil.

❖ The tree with gold represented the tree of Eden and the fall of man

through sin.

Imagery

“And then would come dancing girls,

graceful and dainty, and young girls selling fruit”(Chaucer 515).

“O stomach! O belly! O stinking bag,

Filled with dung and corruption,

at either end of you the sound is foul” (519 Chaucer)