Inside Chaucer's Pardoner?

Description: Assesses the Pardoner as a "puzzle" posed by Chaucer to challenge his audience to consider the relationship between morality and story-telling. The Pardoner's dazzling rhetoric, his relics, and the tensions between his immoral prologue and moral tale imply that there is no inner meaning within superficial reality. The Pardoner poses "language without morality," but through his adaptation of the "Roman de la Rose" in the Host's rejection of the churchman, Chaucer subverts the Pardoner's stance and affirms inner meaning and truth.

Chaucer Subjects: Pardoner and His Tale; Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations