Chaucer
Write a critical analysis of the passage you choose for discussion, giving due regard to what is going on in the passage, but paying particular attention to the means by which the poet makes his point. Please focus on the passage, but you may need to relate it to the rest of the text or to like texts. You should extend your analysis to considerations of the text's place and work - circulation, function, audience, etc. That is to say, try to present not just a critical but a rhetorical reading of the text you choose to discuss.In this passage Chaucer sets up a contrast between the Pardoner and the sins he supposedly offers repentance for, to show the Pardoner is more sinned than sinners. He does so through a group of young companions who undertake activities of vice in each others company. They gamble, solicit prostitutes and frequent taverns together, "Of yonge folk that haunteden foyle/ As riot, hasard, stywes, and taverns" (II. 463-464). Gluttony, lechery and drunkeness are repeated throughout the passage. They are compared to the Devil and devilish activities, "And eten also and drynken over hir myght/ Thurgh wh
From this is gives you an insight into how Chaucer handles the human psychology (Benson 338). Under ordinary circumstances, prudence would constrain him to suppress the exhibition of this pride; but the circumstances are not ordinary' (Kittredge 830). It can be claimed that the Pardoner functions as a lost soul. First of all an indulgence should not be sold and secondly it should be granted by someone contrite and confessed, not by someone more sinned than the sinners themselves like the Pardoner, and thirdly an indulgence has to be earned and evidence that it was deserved was usually necessary (Kellogg & Haselmayer252). Chaucer wanted to display his unrest with the vice of the church and wanted to make it evident to the middle-class in a comical and interesting way to maintain their attention. Many survivors of the plague were also left disillusioned with the church's lack of explanation and inability to deal with the outbreak ("Black Death 1-2). He directed his work towards the middle-class, writing his work in English and not French, the language of the upper-class, as he viewed them as playing a significant role in the future. The plague hit the ecclesiastical society the hardest, it has been estimated that two thirds of the clergy died within a year and almost 40% of priests died within two. Chaucer's Pardoner is directed at this state of insitutional decay. He kept the piece easy to read as he was challenging popular thought of the middle ages, that the church had absolute and unquestioned power. He is skillful at his business: it has brought him in a hundred marks (almost seven hundred pounds in our values) a year since he first took it up. He wrote the Pardoner as a means of propaganda. Chaucer wrote his Canterbury Tales just after the worst of the bubonic plague had subsided. Of all the vices the Pardoner sells repentance for, he is guilty of commiting himself.
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Acceptance Essays
