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Unit 9: The Prologue to the Canterbury Tales (Non-detailed Study): Discussion and Analysis-I

Self Assessment Notes

Short Answer Type Questions:
1. How many pilgrims are making the journey to Canterbury?
2. How many of the tales did Chaucer actually complete?
3. What weaknesses within the church do the pilgrim clergy represent?
4. Why is it appropriate that the Knight should tell the first story?
5. Which features of the romance are evident in this tale?
6. How do Arcite and Palamon come to be imprisoned?
7. What is the theme of the Knight’s Tale?
8. What does Chaucer seem to be saying about marriage?
9. What basic human need motivates each of the characters?
10. What is the theme of the Miller’s Tale?

Analysis

“Game” and “ernest” are two important concepts in reading the Tales representing respectively
jokiness, frivolousness and fun, and seriousness, morality and meaningfulness. Yet one of the things
the Miller’s Tale makes clear is that it becomes very difficult to decide what is lighthearted fun and
what is meaningful, moral telling. The story of John the carpenter is grounded in reality: the details of
the story all make sense, and it appears to be set within a suburban, believable Oxford that Chaucer
might have known. Yet the story itself is clearly a fabliau: and its sources confirm its debt to fabliau-
a hugely elaborate trick, set up with huge care in the story, which snaps shut as the story ends.
Immediately “realism” is juxtaposed with “fantasy”.
The same problem is bequeathed directly to the reader at the end of the tale: when, after the glorious
moment at which John comes crashing down through the roof, and our pleasure in Nicholas’ elaborate
trick stops, Chaucer suddenly focuses on John’s pain. The result of the elaborate trick is an old man,
lying unconscious, pale and wan, with a broken arm on his cellar floor-his house destroyed, his
wife cuckolded. Is Chaucer doing precisely what the narrator tells us, at the end of the prologue, we
musn’t do, and making “ernest” of “game”? Maybe–and the Tales as a whole tread a careful,
ambiguous line between the serious and the comic.
The same ambiguity of tone is applied to the Christian theme which runs throughout the tale. John
the carpenter’s plan involves floating up through the roof in his kneading tub when the flood comes;
and yet the tale replaces his idealistic upward movement with a crashing downward movement,
through his house to the cellar floor. Christian uplift is replaced with a rather damning fall. We
might usefully compare this to the fall in discourse and in subject matter from the Knight’s Tale to
the Miller’s Tale: a step downward for the tales themselves as a linear movement (as the Host seems
to know full well) in Middle English class distinction–a noble knight to a churlish, drunken miller.
Metaphorically speaking, John the carpenter isn’t the only thing to come crashing down in this tale.
Is this, then, a blasphemous version of Christianity? Well, it all depends how seriously we read it. If
we are offended by Absolon’s devilish transformation at the end of the tale (into a blackened devil
carrying a flaming iron), or if we recognise the alignment of Alison and Nicholas with Adam and
Eve (and the respective falls from grace which follow), then perhaps we might view the tale as
deliberately depicting sin. And yet, even though the tale itself is a comic delight-and there is a
tremendous amount of pleasure to be had from reading it-the Miller’s Tale is far from a negative,
anti-type example of sinners in action.

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