Essay on Human Nature and The Canterbury Tales -- Canterbury Tales Ess

Human Nature and The Canterbury Tales When Geoffrey Chaucer undertook the piece of writing of The Canterbury Tales, he had a long road ahead of him. He intend to tell two stories from each of thirty pilgrims on the way to Canterbury, and because two more from each pilgrim on the way back from Canterbury. Of these, he completed only twenty-four. However, in these tales, Chaucer depicts both the pilgrims and their stories with striking realism. In The Nuns Priests Tale, The Canons Yeomans Tale, The Friars Tale, The Reeves Tale, and The Clerics Tale, Chaucer demonstrates his strange insight into human nature. By comparing and contrasting these tales, one cigarette see the universality of human nature as shown by Chaucer. nonpareil human trait apparent in these selections is greed. Avarice drives the hearts of many a(prenominal) men, whether they may be a common miller or a summoner or a supposedly religious enactment, and Chaucer was aware of this. In the tales which take awa y these three characters, Chaucer depicts the greed of these characters. The Reeve tells his fellow pilgrims in his tale of a miller who was a thief ... of corn and meal, and sly at that his enclothe was to steal (Chaucer 125). The summoner in The Friars Tale drew large profits to himself thereby, and as the devil observes of him in this tale, Youre out for wealth, acquired no matter how (Chaucer 312, 315). The canon in Part 1 of The Canons Yeomans Tale, as well as the Yeoman himself, had been control by the goal of converting base metals into gold, and though we never realized the wished result we still went on raving in our illusion (Chaucer 478). The second canon of which the Yeoman speaks is many times worse than his own canon and master, using h... .... Works Cited Balliet, Gay L. The Wife in Chaucers Reevess Tale Siren of loving Vengeance. English expression Notes 28.1 (1990) 1-5. Baylor, Jeffrey. The Failure of the Intellect in Chaucers Reeves Tale. English Language Notes 28.1 (1990) 17-19. Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales. Trans. Nevill Coghill. Baltimore Penguin Books, 1960. Dictionary of Literary Biography Old and Middle English. Ed. Jeffrey Helteman and Jerome Mitchell. Detroit Sale Research, Inc., 1994. Edden, Valerie. blessed and Secular in the Clerks Tale. The Chaucer Review 26.4 (1992) 369-376. Fehrenbacher, Richard W. A Yeerd Enclosed Al About Literature and fib in the Nuns Priests Tale. The Chaucer Review 29.2 (1994) 134-148. Whittock, Trevor. A Reading of The Canterbury Tales. Cambridge University of Cambridge Press, 1970.