Complete Literature Breakdown of Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales

Literature styles, methods, and forms influence the reader’s perception of the text a lot while he reads the composition. As for example, the works of the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries are perceived differently in comparison with the ones written in the last one hundred years. This difference becomes even bigger when people read the stories composed in the fourteenth century. One of the good examples of such distinction is Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Canterbury Tales”. Some of its fragments were written even before the holistic narrative was explored. The core part of this composition was written between 1386 and 1389. The work itself belongs to the ancient traditional genre of the collection of stories and novels which are united by a single plot. One of the theories states that the idea of this composition was taken from Boccaccio’s “The Decameron”. The rhyming couplets are best ones to characterize “The Canterbury Tales” style as two lines rhyme with each other. There is also an iambic pentameter, with each line containing ten syllables, and a heavily emphasized syllable following a less emphasized one.

The dynamic and figuratively built plot gives Chaucer a chance to use or parody almost all the genres on literature written in that period. As for example, one of the main contributing parts of “The Canterbury Tales” is written as a novelette. At the same time, this work also contains some elements from other medieval genres. The knight tells an adventure in the corresponding styled novel and the Prioress narrates the legend about a tortured Christian boy. The carpenter, however, provides the obscene story with the spirit of urban folklore and the tales of the Friar and the Franklin, at the same time, are written in a fable style. The narrative of the Merchant contains elements of folklore tale and parable. It is also important to mention, that each of the stories told appears spontaneously during the characters’ conversation. Some of them complement or set off the previous ones and this makes “The Canterbury Tales” look as a solid composition. This is what makes Geoffrey Chaucer be an innovator in literature, it is the synthesis of several different and opposing genres that creates a single and one-of-a-kind work. By having an individual-specific style, each separate story within the tales contributes to the creation of a peculiar encyclopedia of medieval genres. Based on crossing different forms and mixing his individual and traditional ways of storytelling, the writer creates a new type of narrative. In total, “The Canterbury Tales” are told in a way, in which every story is a parody of the previous one or the exact way of telling the story that was popular in medieval time.

Many of the 24 tales of Chaucer’s work are taken from other books of the medieval period. These are the stories of the Knight, the Man of Law, the Monk, and several more characters. Others take their beginnings from a well-known folklore narratives. The only one that differs is the one told by the Parson as it is the sermon. Chaucer is relies on the 'estates satire' for his portraits, which is basically stereotypes based on the occupation people take or the social class they belong to. Another idea drawn upon is 'anticlericalism' being another collection of stereotypes about priests, monks, nuns, friars, and the like. In “The Canterbury Tales”, characters perceive life as it is from the practical point of view, which is not the one that should be. The reproduction of the obsolete truths of the golden age of chivalry is based on views of Chaucer’s contemporary young generation appearing in the image of the Squire, on traditional adventurous heroics of a genre, the one that is witty, infecting, and peculiar only to cheerful maximalist natures. This is how the character of the Squire appears, receiving finishing and, apparently, unexpected strokes in the story. A sybaritic the clodhopper in a portrait sketch of a General Prologue, as the storyteller, he summons sincere sympathy. In essence, he represents the parody of the conservative type of knight acting in times that are new and unexplored to him. The story bares the convention of the ideal hero who was always unattractive and whose immersion in life, on the one hand, crushes, on the other hand, properly changes it. This drop creates a polemic with the genre of the chivalry tale in which leaving in the another, after death life 'humanizes' the hero. In total, by outlining a portrait gallery of a General Prologue and creating the characters out of static faces, Chaucer adds drama to 'The Canterbury Tales'.

Pilgrims disclose their essence not only in stories and characteristics made by the author, but they prove it in dynamic disputes and dialogues, in the squabbles saturated with the drama content, the discussions and observations people did for each other. Here is where the objectivity of the features of characters come from. The self-characteristics and responses to them also straightly follow the real characters of people in the story most of the time. The author banters at the Monk, disclosing his moral buffoonery while the Miller attacks the Host, and vice versa, and this opens the most unpleasant features in the natures of satellites. In addition, by offending the Cook in obscene expressions, the Franklin shows himself from the bad side. In this case nothing contradicts psychological credibility. Considering an image of the Knight as the ideal figure having the embodiment of the dignity, nobility and honor, but at the same time possessing some shortcomings, it is appropriate to conduct a research of his story in the view of its structure and poetic means used by the author to create the completeness of the character’s image. The story narrates about the love of two cousins, Palamon and Arsita, to the daughter-in-law of the Duke of Athens, Aemilia. Cousins, being the princes of the hostile country, are being imprisoned in a dungeon by Theseus’s order. There, from a high tower they both see Aemilia and fall in love with her. The hostility appears between cousins and when Theseus finds it out, he organizes a knight tournament, promising to give Aemilia to the winner. By the intervention of gods, Palamon wins and Arsita dies by accident. The story comes to an end with Palamon and Aemilia's wedding. Here it should be mentioned that the Knight’s story is one of the longest presented by pilgrims. This legend creates a feeling of solemnity and grandeur of the narration as the story-teller often recedes from the main action to present listeners with big fragments of the detailed descriptions which often don’t relate to the plot development (the description of women of Thebes, mourning death of husbands, the depiction of temples, festivals, and battles).

Chaucer's knowledge of life is not just a detached observation of the researcher. His love towards people is not sentimental or maudlin and his laugh is not a heartless mockery. Such a combination of love towards human beings, laughter and knowledge of life puts a sympathetic and understanding smile on Chaucer's face. “To understand all is to forgive all” the saying states. Actually, Chaucer does forgive a lot. The Wife of Bath's Tale, a tragic tale of an aging vivacious woman, as well as the stories of the Miller and the Merchant about a young wife of an old husband, are humanistic in this sense, although the author does not ignore the stark reality. By letting an Oxford student tell a story about a resigned passion-bearer named Griselda, Chaucer casts doubt upon a deed of a mother who sacrifices her children for the sake of marital obedience.

All the medieval ideas about marriage, obedience, Divine Justice, rights, obligations, and human dignity are turned inside out and thoroughly shaken up. The Wife of Bath’s confession is written as crude farce, but at the same time it is, in fact, tragic. It could not have been written by any other medieval writer. Fabliau situations are often risky and require a 'vile language', but Chaucer enriches them with naive yet fresh coarseness of his century's folkways. As the author appeals to the reader: 'Store grain, and cast away a peel'. This peel of his of fabliau, some of its anecdotalism and roughness is a tribute to the genre and the to a century. The healthy grain, however, is the new that we find in them: the well-aimed and juicy national language, the common sense counterbalanced with sober, derisive criticism, the bright, alive, and energetic narration, the salty joke falling in place, sincerity and freshness, all-justifying sympathetic smile and victorious laughter. The peel that easily falls down cannot hide naughty, vigorous enthusiasm and a banter that derisions it’s worthy. All this serves Chaucer as means for the image of the contemporary terrestrial person who already inhaled the first trends of the coming Renaissance, but not always able to realize and enshrine 'cheerful free-thinking' peculiar to it in abstract terms and concepts.

Chaucer provides everything in a contradictional contrast. The life’s roughness and dirt emphasize the arising love, the withering accents the thirst for life, and the vital uglinesses form the beauty of youth. All this occurs on the verge of ridiculousness. Laughter does not manage to abate yet, tears don’t have enough time to dry, causing this mixed and positive feeling which was later defined in England as humour. The Chaucer’s compositional skill is firstly shown in his ability to connect the unjoinable. He represents the diverse satellites with the magnificent ease, and gradually from separate strokes the live image of the person appears, and from accumulation of separate portraits the picture of all the medieval society of England shapes up. 'The Canterbury Tales' is motley and multi-color work, same as real life. Sometimes it is bright and in other moments it is dim and unattractive. Several stories that are invaluable as a separate ones gain sense and find their place through contrast comparison in the general context. Chaucer’s composite innovation allowed it to admit all contradictory features of the book in a realistic dominant. For this reason even fantastic, allegorical and moralizing stories are realistically justified as possible from the storyteller. The writer creates the main plot precisely, concisely, vividly and promptly. It examples in the end of the Pardoner’s tale about three rakes or the one of the story of the chaplain about a pursuit of the wood. All complex fable tissue and a prompt ending of the story of the miller can be an example of it. Chaucer is reserved and avaricious as the story-teller, but when it is necessary to delineate his characters, he skillfully draws both a room of the fellow of Nicholas, and a hovel of the widow, the Shantikler's mistress, and an excellent genre sketch of arrival of the monk-collector to the spiritual son Thomas’s house.

Chaucer, generally speaking, avoids long self-sufficing descriptions. He fights against them with the weapon of parody, or straightens out himself: 'But, apparently, I distracted a little'. Sometimes he gets off them by a playful excuse: “Me list not of the chaff nor of the stre* *straw Make so long a tale, as of the corn. What should I tellen of the royalty Of this marriage, or which course goes beforn, Who bloweth in a trump or in an horn? The fruit of every tale is for to say; They eat and drink, and dance, and sing, and play.” At the same time, when it is necessary to explain the story-teller’s character, Chaucer for the sake of this main objective renounces everything, even kind to it laconicism. Chaucer surrounds the main plot, which is laconic and prompt, in the spirit of the Middle Ages, with an infinite ligature of slow reasonings and lectures and ragged brightness of playful parody and moralizing or satirical interludes. He subordinates all this to character of the story-teller and includes the story in a frame of a big epic form. The Chaucer’s narration flows with the ease, freedom and naturalness typically unprecedented for those times.

As a result this book is distinguished in general even from other works of this author by the exclusive brightness and realism of the image, wealth and expressiveness of language. It is laconic when necessary and sometimes it has pure Rabelaisian redundancy and courage. As the person of a critical era, Chaucer could not ignore thinking of the events. Even in objective and smiling 'The Canterbury Tales' the reader continuously meets the mournful and indignant words about the violence reigning everywhere and self-interest. Violence is a terrible heritage of the past and the self-interest is a new ulcer of a selling-based and shameless century. The reader is being told about the extortion of the monk-collector and police officer of ecclesiastical court inflicted with the bless of his boss, vicar. The person reads carefully shown, but transparent hints on an arbitrariness and lawlessness of those whom Chaucer calls crowned glenlivets. It is difficult to speak about spiritual shape of the poet as documents which could shed light on this question either did not exist, or were lost during six centuries passed since then. It is only possible to judge about the Chaucer’s inner world only by his works. It is thought that 'The Canterbury Tales' in general, with all their genre diversity and the variety of the ideas, subjects, art and means of their expression can give an idea of the rich, versatile identity of the writer.

The Chaucer’s pilgrim as one of elements of the world of 'The Canterbury Tales' submits to intentions of the author and serves the his purposes. The storyteller declares aspiration to objectivity. However it is only a mask behind which the writer’s point of view is clearly notable. The quantitative and qualitative complication of compositional techniques (the combination of all the known framing motifs; the multifunctionality of the new method of interrupting narration and such structural elements as prologues and epilogues to stories; expanding the possibilities of framing novella) testifies to the collection’s movement towards a more closely linked narration.

In other words “The Canterbury Tales” is a perfect example of the Chaucer`s significant writing skills which are absolutely unique. The great usage of the literary receptions as well as a complicated formation of the composition and the versatility of meaning convey all the experiences and moods of that period of time. By recalling to the structure of the narrative collection, Geoffrey Chaucer solved several issues. He joined together his extensive poetic experience, pictured the national portrait of England in the fourteenth century and faced the process of forming the national self-awareness. This writer also created the concept of the development of the medieval English literature and brought his own idea of the literature’s purpose in a person’s life as taking personal opinion and puzzling out different works independently. Chaucer's achievements got their further development later and fixed his position as meaningful author of national literature.