The Deceived Deceiver: Chaucer’s Pardoner
The theme of deception in The Pardoner’s Tale and Prologue establishes a frame from which the entire story, told by both, can be interpreted. Irony between the moral of The Pardoner’s tale and his morality as a character is instantly apparent. The meaning of the story told by both the tale and the prologue depends on, but is not limited to, this irony. The pardoner is more than a hypocrite. He is a person with idiosyncrasies, capable of contradiction. The primary focus of the whole story is on him.
The pardoner’s tale does not stand alone so well. Without the added meaning provided by the presence of its teller, The Pardoner’s tale is predictably moralistic and built on weak characters. They have none of the complex characterization that Chaucer labors to give The Pardoner in his prologue. The only distinguishing traits that the three main characters of The Pardoner’s tale have is that they are simply villains and that one of them is younger than the other two (Tale, 353). These characters’ villainy (their disrespect, stealing, murder, and drinking) is not so various as to give them any depth of character, but only enough to provide a springboard from which The Pardoner can launch into the condemnation of any of their numerous sins (Tale, 20-179). On the other hand, The Pardoner himself is intricately characterized, in exquisite detail, which goes so far as to suggest the condition of the man’s testicles. Clearly, the focus is on the Pardoner.
The pardoner is the most important element of the whole story, yet he is not the subject of most of the text, or is he? The Pardoner’s tale is a condemnation of greed. The audience already knows that the Pardoner introduced himself as a con man, who makes his living selling phony relics, so it is in light of this that the reader can easily label The Pardoner as a hypocrite because he does not live up to the ethics he preaches. The hypocrisy of The Pardoner’s story further emphasizes the character of the story’s teller.
The pardoner chooses to tell a story with a moral that condemns his most pervasive sin. Perhaps this is because he knows the results of such sin. Having committed the sin, he is more acquainted with it than an innocent person would be. This makes him more qualified to tell the story, so long as the audience can look past his hypocrisy without letting it entirely discredit him. The audience does discredit him anyway. Perhaps because of the Pardoner’s drunkenness he has fooled himself into thinking that the moral of his story, and thus his potential for profit, would be enhanced by his confession, when in fact the confession was his undoing.
The Pardoner’s brief suggestion that he sins so that others don’t have to was not enough to convince anyone that they should overlook his hypocrisy (Pardoner’s Prologue, 101-104).
Although the characters may not be very masterfully constructed in his story, the Pardoner’s grasp of the figurative is more effective. Two figurative elements in his story serve to enrich the story and also to demonstrate more of The Pardoner’s character. They are the old man’s use of figurative language, and the language concerning “death.”
The pardoner does not construct the character of the old man in his story in a way that is consistent with the other characters. The other characters are tailor-made for a sermon, however the old man is not. Had he been tailor made for a sermon the old man would look forward to an afterlife in heaven, or fear a damnation in hell, and he might not be in such a hurry to die. There is very little mention of any of this Christian spirituality coming from the character of the old man. Instead, he likens his eventual reunion with the earth to a mother’s embrace, which suggests a womb, birth and the possibility that the old man believes in reincarnation (246-256). This is hardly the stuff of a Christian sermon. Interestingly, it is also the largest occurrence of spiritual language in the entire story. There are biblical references, but this is the only spiritual material that comes in the form of a characters own words. The existence of an alternate spirituality in his story suggests that, in addition to his failure to follow them, The Pardoner may not even believe his teachings.
The language concerning death in The Pardoner’s tale adds an interesting twist to its meaning. Initially, death is personified as a thief, whom the other thieves attempt to thwart because of their self-deception. They took the personification of death literally. The old man then leads them to believe that he has left death beneath a tree (280-281). In a way he has, for he has left a bag of gold beneath the tree. The old man understands that money is death; the young men do not. The minute they encounter the money they forget their pursuit of death, except that the money is their pursuit because, as we have already been told, money is death (290). The Pardoner, in light of his criminalized vocation, probably agrees with both the thieves and the old man. He is well educated enough to understand the consequences of greed. This is what enables him to create the character of the old man. The pardoner seeks money anyway, because it is a comfort, an escape, and for him it is an escape from the fact of his greed, a justification. The pardoner has duped himself into a viciously addictive cycle. Money is the basis and the demise of his life. He understands this, or else he would not have been capable of his own story.
The pardoner believes he is duping his audience by using phony ethics to sell bogus relics and fake pardons. However, it is their adherence to those ethics that prevent the audience from buying anything from him. It is the fact that they already know the story’s moral that prevents them from letting it distract them from the storyteller’s morality. It is The Pardoner, then, who has been duped. He has deceived himself into believing that he can trick his audience. His failure to do so suggests that his earlier boasts may be another deception. Perhaps he is not a successful con man as he claims.
Works Cited
- Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales. Tr. Theodore Morrison.
- The Anthology of World Masterpieces. Ed. Maynard Mack et. al. 6th ed. vol. 1. New York: Norton, 1992. 1512-1576.