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

Human Nature and The Canterbury Tales When Geoffrey Chaucer undertook the writing of The Canterbury Tales, he had a tenacious road ahead of him. He intended to tell two stories from each of thirty pilgrims on the way to Canterbury, and then 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 remarkable insight into human nature. By comparing and severalize these tales, one can see the universality of human nature as shown by Chaucer. One human trait apparent in these selections is greed. Avarice drives the wagon of many men, whether they may be a common miller or a summoner or a supposedly religious canon, and Chaucer was aware of this. In the tales which engage 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 habit was to sneak (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 driven by the goal of converting base metals into gold, and though we never realized the wished conclusion we still went on rave 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 Sweet Vengeance. English Language 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 C anterbury Tales. Trans. Nevill Coghill. Baltimore Penguin Books, 1960. Dictionary of Literary Biography Old and eye English. Ed. Jeffrey Helteman and Jerome Mitchell. Detroit Sale Research, Inc., 1994. Edden, Valerie. Sacred and Secular in the Clerks Tale. The Chaucer Review 26.4 (1992) 369-376. Fehrenbacher, Richard W. A Yeerd Enclosed Al About Literature and History 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.