The Cook's Tale Analysis

When reading the cook’s tale the story abruptly ends before it even starts. The question the reader is left to ponder from this abrupt ending to what was supposed to be a vivid story is whether the abrupt ending was intentional or not. There are various arguments as to whether the piece is complete, one scholar argues that due to the state that the manuscript was discovered in that it’s only logical that the piece is incomplete, another posits that maybe Chaucer intentionally left it this way for dramatic effect, maybe the cook never completed his tale, yet others believe and argues that, and this is the most likely argument in my opinion, maybe the cook’s tale was too vulgar and this is why the details of his story were not written. One must

The first tale is the Knight’s he speaks of romantic love, he tells a tale about a superhero and chivalry. It includes lofty language and it gives the aura of a fairytale. The lovers go nights without sleep because of the agony of their love. It is framed as a typical medieval romance. The story that follows this is the Miller’s tale, in this tale the tone and mood shift, from the magical, heroic, lofty, romantic aura rendered by the Knight’s tale to a less romantic and more comical Miller’s tale. The intended order of the story was to descend the social ladder with the Monk; however the drunken Miller interrupts and tells his far less than gaudy tale. The miller’s tale mimics several of the themes that the Knight includes in his tale in a different tone and context. The Knight’s tale reveals that human suffering is a part of the divine plan that morals cannot cope with, the miller makes the same point by saying about God’s secret plans. He emphasises this throughout his tale. He makes the point by paralleling his theme with vulgarity and barbaric references. As is expected by someone under the influence, following the Miller’s less than romantic tale about the carpenter, Nicholas’ young wife making him a cuckold and taking him for an idiot is the Reeve. He tells the a story to quite the Miller’s Tale about a carpenter, the Reeve is offended by the Miller’s tale because he was a carpenter, in his tale he describes the Miller who is taken for a ride by two students, who sleeps with his wife and daughter. Following this tale is the Cook. The unifying theme that these four stories would have is love; they all describe love on different levels. In the cook’s tale we notice the lowest level in that the prostitute has a husband, which makes him accepting of his role as a cuckold. This is the underlying idea in the other stories, however in the other stories the husbands were less than