Greed As Depicted In The Pardoner's Tale

I feel that “The Pardoner’s Tale” is appropriate for the Pardoner to tell because the story reflects a lot of himself. The Pardoner was one of the people who sold “tickets to heaven” as they called it, and also sold pardons to people for their sins. This he even admit did not work and he was solely doing this for the gain of money. The Pardoner even said he would do it to a poor widow. Therefore this is all a trick and it deceives people to think they are actually getting rid of their sins when they aren’t. He tells the pilgrims that he is telling the story to that “Radix malorum est cupiditas”(page 243). This is a biblical latin sentence that means “Greed is the root of evil”. Then as he tells the tale of the three men who wanted to kill a man named Death.

This also showed how people easily get tricked because of their emotions, if they are angry towards something or even sad and depressed about it, they will not pay as much attention towards something before they do it, this being the men going out and trying to kill something that doesn’t actually exist because of their anger. Another important aspect of this story is that the men are killed by themselves because of greed, the two men with the killing of the younger man because they wanted more gold, and the same went for the younger man with the poison. This supports the Pardoner’s statement that greed is the root of evil. This also is ironic because the gold was under the tree which is like the root and it ended up killing them, hence the evil in