Essay On The Difference Between The Knight And The Squire

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The Canterbury Tales

The Knight and The Squire

Comparative Critical Details

Speaking of Chaucer's time and work, in order to understand the exact extent of his achievement in the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, it is necessary to stress the fact that the Middle Ages were not a time of portraits. It was a time of patterns, of allegories, of reducing the specific to the general and then drawing a moral from it. What Chaucer was doing was entirely different.

Before taking into account and analizing the two caracters we have chosen ( the knight and the squire), we have to accept that in the Middle Ages ( and not only, unfortunately), each person was classified according to his or her "estate" or place on the social scale depending …show more content…

They represent one of the three "classical" categories of people that are presented in the Prologue, the worriors - " bellatores."

The description of the two caracters follows the pattern generally used by Chaucer in the Prologue : physical details, the temper, the external appearance, the station in life and also, the behaviour.

As soon as we have finished the short presentation, we find out the "gap" or the discontinuity hidden behind the sweet words of the author, not only due to the difference of their age, clothes or "habits" but in a deeper difference - that of concepts, of what should be the natural course of life.

We find no irony in the Knight's description . As Muriel Bowden said, "Chaucer's Knight is the personification of those [courtly] ideals, yet he is far more than the lay figure he would be were he that alone; like the other pilgrims taking this April journey to Canterbury, he is flesh and blood. He is one of those exceptional heroes who strive to live according to a great ideal yet who are at the same time understandably and understandingly human. (A Commentary on the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, 1969 …show more content…

We can, also consider him as a character " in transition ", because of that contradictory facts that appear, normally, in a state of change. And may be this character suggests and represents a society in transition.

There is another correspondence to be made : when analyzing the two characters, it came into my mind the first point to notice about that opening sentence of The Prologue, that falls into two equal parts, the first focusing on the spring and the second on the holy duty of the pilgrimage. And these could be the two main symbols which give us an explanation about our characters' essence. We find therefore, the first half that really stresses the erotic energies of spring and the second one that focuses on something entirely different, the desire of people to give thanks to God for having survived another winter, another battle...[ the opening sentence announces a powerful theme which runs throughout the General Prologue: that there are two essential forces of life and that what matters is that they be held in a balance (as they are grammatically in the opening

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