Wait a second!
More handpicked essays just for you.
More handpicked essays just for you.
Diversity paper
Diversity research papers
Diversity research papers
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Recommended: Diversity paper
Chaucer and The Canterbury Tales
The Canterbury Tales is about an unrelated group of twenty-nine pilgrims traveling together on a pilgrimage. One of the major aspects of the journey is the unique diversity of the characters. There are knights, nuns, monks, lower-class tradesman and single women. They interact together and tell each other their tales.
GRAPH
According to the Norton Anthology, "Chaucer's original plan for The Canterbury Tales projected about one hundred twenty stories two for each pilgrim to tell on the way to Canterbury and two more on the way back. Chaucer actually completed only twenty-two, although two more exist in fragments" (Norton 79). One of the characteristics that makes Chaucer's work so convincing is his ability to present characters that have real life qualities. Many women can relate to the Wife of Bath, and many college students can relate to the Squire with his lady friends.
The narrator of the tales is Geoffrey Chaucer himself: but he speaks though a variety of media: "...Chaucer's pilgrim narrators represent a wide spectrum of ranks and occupations. The great variety of tales is matched by the diversity of their tellers; tales are assigned to appropriate narrators and juxtaposed to bring out contrasts in genre, style, tone and values" (Norton 79).
The opinions about Chaucer as the pilgrim and as the poet are very different. Chaucer the Pilgrim is the narrator of the tales, and he must give an accurate description of what is going on, even if he disagrees with the character's action. First Chaucer the Pilgrim talks about nature and the seasons. He tells us that he is joined by several people on a journey to Canterbury. He talks about all the people involved in the pilgrimage. First he talks about the knight and then Chaucer talks about the knight's son, then the Yeoman, the Wife of Bath, the Monk, the Merchant, and the Clerk.
Famous author Stephen King said in his book On Writing: a Memoir of the Craft that “ Every book you pick up has its life lessons, and quite often the bad books have more to teach than the good ones” (King 145), but unfortunately not everyone agrees. In today's world, people are becoming more and more easily offended by simple things like the subjects in classic literature, for example To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, and are even trying to ban it in a classroom setting. However, To Kill a Mockingbird should continue to be taught in schools because it positively affects society by changing the way people think about the world, through a very historically accurate setting, and by teaching its readers valuable lessons.
In Meditations, Descartes brings doubt to everything he believes because it is human nature to believe that which is false. He states that most of what he believes comes from the senses and that a lot of times those senses can be deceived. His conclusion of doubting everything is based on his example of a basket of apples. It goes as follows; you have a basket of apples but you fear that some apples have gone bad and you don't want them to rot the others, so you throw all the apples out of the basket. Now that the basket is empty you examine each apple carefully and return the good apples to the basket. This is what he does with his beliefs, he follows and keeps only those beliefs of which he is sure of. Our beliefs as a whole must be discarded and then each individual belief must be looked at carefully before we can accept it. We must only accept those beliefs we feel are good.
Edgar Allan Poe is born in Boston, Massachusetts on the 19th day of January, 1809. He is born to David and Elizabeth Poe, who are both travelling actors. Edgar’s father leaves the family shortly after his birth and his mother would die not long before his third birthday. Edgar Allan Poe is then sent to live with a foster family, this is where he would inherit the name Allan, although they did not formally adopt him. Poe’s foster parents, John and Frances Allan, support him through most of his adolescent years. Poe will start out writing at a young age and attends college only to be cut off from his foster family after Frances Allan dies from tuberculosis. Once out of college, Poe has a brief stint in the military where he continues to write and becomes a published author at the age of only eighteen with his first poem, Tamerlane. Edgar marries his cousin, Virginia Clemm, in 1836 after he reunites with her and his Aunt Maria in Baltimore, Maryland. Poe’s marriage to Virginia proves to be short lived when she passes from tuberculosis in 1847. Poe does not live long after his wife’s death, he dies in Baltimore in 1849 at the age of forty. During Poe’s life, he publishes many short stories and poems, with some of his most notable ones being The Raven, The Tell-Tale Heart, and The Cask of Amontillado. Poe would be well known posthumously due to his famous obituary written by Rufus Griswold. (Hutchisson) (Magistrale)
Descartes sixth very conclusive meditation has similarly to the first very basic concepts. What makes Descartes meditations so remarkable is his methodological approach to his philosophy. He starts right at the foundation of knowledge building his own basis and thoroughly working himself upward. Even though some of his thoughts are slightly contradictory he still manages to make them plausible, and one can accept certain incongruities as one considers the time and social structure he was living in.
The Canterbury Tales, written by Geoffrey Chaucer, is a collection of short stories told amongst pilgrims on their way to Canterbury. The pilgrims are competing against one another to see who can tell the best story on their trip. Along the way Chaucer makes quick comments and critics about the travelers. Some pilgrims he likes, for example the Parson. Others like the Pardoner, are disliked strongly by Chaucer. He also finds some pilgrims entertaining, like the Nun. She is described as a women who, instead of centering her life round Christ, tries to impress everyone. Although in his prologue Chaucer pokes fun at the Nun’s appearance and behavior, ultimately the readers can see that Chaucer
In The Canterbury Tales, written by Geoffrey Chaucer, the stereotypes and roles in society are reexamined and made new through the characters in the book. Chaucer discusses different stereotypes and separates his characters from the social norm by giving them highly ironic and/or unusual characteristics. Specifically, in the stories of The Wife of Bath and The Miller’s Tale, Chaucer examines stereotypes of women and men and attempts to define their basic wants and needs.
Geoffrey Chaucer portrayed a cross section of medieval society though The Canterbury Tales. "The Prologue" or foreword of this work serves as an introduction to each of the thirty one characters involved in the tales. Two of these characters are the Kght and the Squire, who share a father and son relation. These individuals depart on a religious pilgrimage to a cathedral in Canterbury. The Squire, opposed to the Knight, goes for a vacation instead of religious purposes. His intent is not as genuinand pure as his father's.
The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer, (written c. 1387), is a richly varied compilation of fictional stories as told by a group of twenty-nine persons involved in a religious pilgrimage to Canterbury, England during the fourteenth century. This journey is to take those travelers who desire religious catharsis to the shrine of the holy martyr St. Thomas a Becket of Canterbury. The device of a springtime pilgrimage provided Chaucer with a diverse range of characters and experiences, with him being both a narrator and an observer. Written in Middle English, each tale depicts parables from each traveler.
The Canterbury Tales is more than an amusing assortment of stories; it is an illustration of the society in which Geoffrey Chaucer lived. It portrays the culture and class system of the medieval ages in microcosm. Every strata of human life at the time were represented by the many characters whose tales are told. Each character’s basic human nature also plays a role in their stories, and each one has within them the strengths and weaknesses that make up all of humanity. Each character exemplifies their life and reputation through the stories they tell. The Pardoner uses his tale as a ploy to garner money. His tale embodies each deadly sin, and every reader can relate to his story and feel the guilt of his characters. The Wife of Bath’s tale expresses her own ideals in the way her character is given a second chance after committing a crime. The Franklin’s tale, because of its straightforwardness and honesty is a direct representation of the Franklin’s simple and joyful life. Each character tells a tale that is a suitable match to their personality. These characters’ tales represent prevalent themes of the middle ages, including greed, corruption of religious clergymen, violence, revenge, and social status. In Chaucer’s society, the traditional feudal system was losing its importance and the middle class began to emerge. The middle class characters within the Canterbury Tales, with their personal lives and interactions with members of differing social classes, gave an understanding of the growth of society, especially the rising middle class, during medieval times.
Chaucer identifies a pardoner as his main character for the story and utilizes the situational and verbal irony found in the pardoner’s interactions and deplorable personality to demonstrate his belief in the corruption of the Roman Catholic Church during this time. Chaucer first begins his sly jab at the Church’s motives through the description of the Pardoner’s physical appearance and attitude in his “Canterbury Tales.” Chaucer uses the Pardoner as a representation of the Church as a whole, and by describing the Pardoner and his defects, is able to show what he thinks of the Roman Catholic Church. All people present in the “Canterbury Tales” must tell a tale as a part of a story-telling contest, and the pilgrim Chaucer, the character in the story Chaucer uses to portray himself, writes down the tales as they are told, as well as the story teller. The description of the Pardoner hints at the relationship and similarity between the Pardoner and the Church as a whole, as well as marks the beginning of the irony to be observed throughout the “Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale.”
The Canterbury Tales is a great contemplation of stories, that display humorous and ironic examples of medieval life, which imitate moral and ethical problems in history and even those presented today. Chaucer owed a great deal to the authors who produced these works before his time. Chaucer tweaked their materials, gave them new meanings and revealed unscathed truths, thus providing fresh ideas to his readers. Chaucer's main goal for these tales was to create settings in which people can relate, to portray lessons and the irony of human existence.
In General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales the character of Chaucer as the narrator serves as our guide to the action. Chaucer narrates as if he is in the moment himself, just meeting these pilgrims for the first time, and he makes the audience as though they are right there with him. At other times, though, Chaucer is a narrator who seems to know more than he ought to. For example, he tells us that, when the Shipman wins a fight, he murders the loser by throwing him overboard, or that the Reeve is stealing from his master. Are these really stories people would tell Chaucer when first meeting him? Chaucer also seems to know a suspiciously large amount about each pilgrim everyday lives. At these moments, Chaucer acts much more like an omniscient, or all-knowing, narrator, rather than one who's truly in the heat of the action. The reason for this choice could be that verisimilitude, or making things seem like real life, was not as important to a medieval author as it is to authors today. Instead, the narrator might choose to tell whatever he wants in order to better serve the purposes of characterization. The narrator makes it quite clear that he is also a character in his book. Chaucer creates an ‘alter ego’, a pilgrim called ‘Geoffrey’, who is the naïve narrator of the pilgrimage story, commenting on his fellow-pilgrims, and providing the links which join many of the Tales. This further extends Chaucer’s narrative possibilities, enabling him to open up another layer of opinion other than his own. In the General Prologue, the narrator presents himself as a gregarious and naïve character. Later on, the Host accuses him of being silent and sullen. Because the narrator writes down...
In the General Prologue of The Canterbury Tales, the narrator, Geoffrey Chaucer, meets twenty nine pilgrims at the Southwark at the Tabard Inn. They are all going to Canterbury Cathedral to visit the shrine of Sir Thomas Becket. Chaucer decides to tag along, taking some time to describe each pilgrim. The author uses many metaphors, personal histories, and examples of how they would act in certain situations to fully describe the characters in the story. However, some of the pilgrims are given only a few lines of direct description in a very straightforward, visual manner. One of the characters in the tales is Squire, who gets only twenty lines of details, focusing on his appearance, his abilities, and his sexuality.
In Geoffrey Chaucer’s writing, “The Canterbury Tales”, he writes of a pilgrimage and describes every character that is involved, some more in depth than others. Keep in mind that this writing is dated back in the 1300’s, so there is going to be some distinction between those he described on the pilgrimage compared to how one would describe people of today. If Chaucer did write about people today, three people he would most likely choose would be a teacher or professor, a professional athlete, and a song artist.
we see how Chaucer the pilgrim has been swayed and convinced by what the other pilgrims tell him. So much so that he reports qualities that are often the opposite of the true personalities of the characters he is describing. This ambiguity reveals a very clever sort of irony on behalf of the writer - while Chaucer the pilgrim is easily drawn in by their deliberate misrepresentations, it is up to the readers to see how wrong he is and draw their own, more accurate, conclusions. It shows many of the pilgrims to be very different people than those symbolised by the ideal qualities they want others to see.