The Narrator in Chaucer's "Troilus."

Description: Analyzes the narrator of TC as a "dramatic" character—one who is known "by what he says rather than what is said about him"--whose shifting perspectives in the poem inflect readers' opinions of the other characters and their actions. The shifts also compel readers to recognize that the narrator is himself a character--not "a historian or commentator, a master of events, but as a dupe of time, a mortal of little, brief authority" when viewed from the eternal perspective of the poem's envoy. The perspective of the envoy shifts from the narrator's to the poet's.