The Pardoner's Prologue and Tale is a self-contained story within The Canterbury Tales and is linked to the frame of the entire text by the narrator Geoffrey Chaucer. Ever word spoken by the Pardoner is no more than the account of the narrator "reporting all his (the Pardoner's) language faithfully" (1915). To better understand the theme and the maze of frames surrounding the tale within his report; I will explain it starting from the tale itself and work my way out to the frames. In this way I hope to uncover the development of the theme, show how it is adapted to the frame and how the theme is subverted or rather undermined to the benefit of Pardoner.
             The Pardoner's tale is a short account of three men who become victims of their greed. The story is splattered with accounts of the men's gluttony, drunkenness, swearing (Jer. 4:2), and gambling. Throughout the tale the Pardoner's paints a clear picture of the men's low character, but at the root of all their sinning lies greed, the sin by which the rest are fed (Radix malorum est cupiditas.) and eventually becomes the cause of their deaths. The entire story is a lesson that the Pardoner recites to his audiences to convict them of their own greedy desires.
             The tale is adapted to the framed by the Pardoners message, a kind of "sub-frame" that supports his theme. This section of the tale is a sermon by which the Pardoner prepares his audiences for his account of the three sinful men. He begins by condemning gluttony describing it as, "the cause of mankind's fall"(1936). Then drunkenness, claiming that it strips a man of his self-respect (1937). He then accuses gambling as "the mother of low scheming"(1938), and lastly swearing and false oaths describing them as "abominable" and "reprehensible"(1939). By exposing these sins the Pardoner unveils his the
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