Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales

The relationship is seen between the teller of a tale and the story that he or she chooses to share. Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, presents several stories of moral awareness and human desire. These tales are tales of vice and virtues each told from a demographically different view point and each travelers’ tales reflect on the teller’s personal traits. A major theme seen in The Canterbury Tales, is that one tale is simply a retelling of the previous tale but with a repayment to the teller of the previous tale. Chaucer’s work in The Canterbury Tales serves as a social commentary that is rhetorically complex infusing fluctuating levels of ethos between Chaucer, the tellers and the tellers characters.

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The miller is characterized as aggressive, rebellious, and upsets all conventions. The miller’s unconventional personality is demonstrated in his tale as it centralizes around an abnormal marriage, a wife who is disloyal, and a parishioner who desires another man’s wife. The reeve’s tale is motivated by anger towards the Miller and the Miller cast doubt on the Reeve’s marriage. The Miller suggesting that he would not ever dream of making these same claims about his own wife’s fidelity is in turn doubting the Reeve’s objections in his proposed tale. The Clerk in The Canterbury tales details the test of patients that Griselda endures to exemplify what a good wife should be like and his perspective on Griselda’s story infers that loyalty must not undergo these extreme tests. This tale sounds like instructions toward wives on patients but Clerk warns that people can’t expect to live up to Griselda’s example and praises the Wife of Bath for comments about a woman needing mastery in her marriage. The clerk’s solution to this, played out by the Petrarch character, says this story is not about a wife’s behavior toward husbands but actually a tale about how human beings should behave towards

It would seem everyone in the Franklin tale is noble and honorable. In The Canterbury Tales, all the characters have satirical elements and it seems everyone is noble and honorable in the Franklin tale. However, the Franklin is very generous but has the flaw of being very demanding of perfection. Just as the Franklin is generous in giving people food, the characters of his story all have some expression of generosity but each contains a flaw of their own. His tale also reflects his high view of generosity but in the same way is hypocritical by his own flaw and lack of recognition in the flaws of the characters. The satire in his tale comes from the Franklin preaching about being noble but he himself is not noble in his daily life due to his quick temperedness and the reprimanding of his employees if his desire of perfection is not