Irony and Death in
The Pardoner’s Tale
Nicole Kurtz
English IV, English IV Honors
General Information



Pardoners sold pardons—
official documents from
Rome that pardoned a
person’s sins.
The Pardoner in Chaucer’s
The Canterbury Tales is
dishonest.
The Pardoner often
preaches about how money
is the root of all evil.
Summary of the Tale



The Pardoner stands in the pulpit
and preaches very rapidly
about the sin of avarice so as to
intimidate the members into
donating money.
In his prologue, the Pardoner
frankly confesses that he is a
fraud motivated by greed and
avarice and that he is guilty of
all seven sins.
The Pardoner and the Host get
into a verbal argument, and he
was unable to pardon or forgive
the Host. More irony.
The Pardoner’s Prologue


The Pardoner's Prologue is, like those of the Wife of
Bath and Canon's Yeoman, an "apologia" or
"literary confession," in which a character explains
his or her way of life (Benson, 2000).
The Pardoner's Prologue is less lengthy than the
Wife of Bath's but serves to provide a powerfully
ironic frame to the sermon that forms the body of
his Tale. The Prologue serves to make us aware of
the difference that can exist between a Tale and its
Teller (Anthony, n.d.).
Chaucer’s dissatisfaction



There was widespread dissatisfaction with pardoners (as
also with money-loving Friars) in Chaucer's time, and both
were popular subjects of satire and joking.
This can be found especially in parts of Piers Plowman,
which Chaucer may have known. There was a fully
developed satire of the avarice and corruption manifested
by so many people associated with the Church, an
awareness of the failure of many to practice the teachings
of Christ.
In Chaucer's age that gave birth to the challenge expressed
by Wyclif and the Lollards, which in turn later found full
expression in Luther's protest and the Reformation (Anthony,
n.d.).
Irony



The main interest of the Pardoner's Prologue and Tale, taken
as a whole, is the complexity of the irony.
Thus, his text contains a double irony: His love for money is
the root of his evil, yet his sales depend upon the
purchaser's love of money.
The Pardoner has composed this wonderfully powerful Tale
(sermon) in such a way as to move his hearers to the utmost.
Only his motivation in doing this is not love (a desire to save
them from their sins) but vice (a desire to make them anxious
so that they give him much money) (Anthony, n.d.).
Irony in the Pardoner’s Tale



The strongest irony comes in lines (Riverside) 427-31 when he
explains that avarice (greed) is his own vice and at the same
time (line 425 'therefore') the vice he preaches against with
such powerful effect that he brings people to repent of their
avarice sincerely (but not himself, he is glad to note).
His only concern is that, realizing their sinfulness, they give him
money to benefit from his pardons. All the money he gets he
seems to regard as his own and he explains that he does not
intend to be like Christ's apostles who worked hard with their
hands; he does not care if he takes from very poor people, so
that their children starve, so long as he can enjoy himself.
He ends by stressing the irony: he himself is 'a full vicious man;
yet he can tell a moral tale (Anthony, n.d.).
Death personified


The Pardoner’s Tale is a
reminder that death is
inevitable. Death is
personified as a thief who
pierces the heart of his
victims. This was an
iconographic image of
death throughout the
middle ages and later.
(image taken from
www.vidimus.org/.../issue_40_201003.html )
Death personified (con’t)


The tale refers to death as the person responsible
for slaughtering one thousand by his hand during
the plague (line 670).
The three men from the bar are determined to
challenge death because he has taken away their
friends. In their humorous and selfish endeavor to
get revenge with death, they actually do death's
job for him by killing each other over a pot of gold
(David and Wilson, 1999).
References
Anthony, B. (n.d.). The pardoner’s prologue and tale. Retrieved from
http://hompi.sogang.ac.kr/anthony/Chaucer/Pardoner.htm on October
18, 2010.
Benson, L.D. (2000). The pardoner’s prologue and tale. Retrieved from
http://www.courses.fas.harvard.edu/~chaucer/canttales/pardt.
David, C. and C. Wilson. (1999). Chaucer and death in the middle ages.
Retrieved on http://www.auburn.edu/chaucer/Pardoner.htmon October
18, 2010.
Delahoyed, Michael (n.d). The pardoner’s tale. Washington State.
Retrieved from http://www.wsu.edu/~delahoyd/chaucer/ParT.html.
Jokinen, A. (1996-2010). The pardoner’s tale. Retrieved from
http://www.luminarium.org/medlit/pardoner.htm on October 18, 2010.