Pardoner's Irony

In Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, the character of The Pardoner tells an ironic tale, while being a masterpiece of irony himself. The story he tells is an allegory, which is a story which teaches a lesson. These were very popular in the time period of The Canterbury Tales. The pardoner makes a living by travelling around and granting ‘pardons,’ which were a document effectively pardoning one of sin. He uses his tale to coerce people to purchase a forged pardon, which exhibits his hypocrisy. In doing so, Chaucer is criticizing the church. The pardoner’s ironic lifestyle becomes his downfall as he fails to get money from his pardons.

The pardoner exhibits multiple forms of irony in his daily actions. In medieval literature, the seven deadly sins were a prominent theme, and the pardoner actually confesses to committing five of them. He commits debauchery, alcoholism, gambling, greed, and avarice. This makes him an immoral man telling a very moral tale. This is an example of situational irony. He regularly commits the sin of avarice, derived from the Latin term avarus, meaning greedy. Avarice is the extreme desire for money or possessions. While on the surface, this may produce a negative image for the pardoner, he has strong motives for his actions. In painting his

First of all, the pardoner says that money is the root of all evil, yet he also claims that he loves nothing more than money. In doing this, he is being verbally ironic. He continues on to say that those men who do not follow Christian morals are sinful, but he does not truly believe this as he does not follow Christian morals himself. This effectively exempts himself from the Christian text he portrays. He is essentially a hypocrite that exploits Christian principles in moral tales to steal money from the people he is supposed to pardon. He does this to fill his need for