Canterbury Tales: Who Is The Narrator?
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The narrator in The Canterbury Tales is an enigma. He turns his searching gaze on everyone on the pilgrimage except himself, finishing up in a rush with "Ther was also a Reve, and a Millere, A Somnour, and a Pardoner also, A Maunciple, and myself -- ther were namo" (1). Not a word about what he himself does for a living, or where he stands socially. To find out who he is and what he does, we must look for clues in the text.
We know he's not just a talker who's telling a story once, but a writer who has produced a written copy of the story, and knows it may survive to be read by others. His promise to produce a word-for-word transcript of the pilgrimage, to "reherce as ny as evere he kan ...
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is also a pilgrim. He says it clearly: "in that seson on a day, In Southwerk at the Tabard as I lay Redy to wenden on my pilgrymage" (1). But the fact that he is a pilgrim gives no clue to what he does in real life; beggars and kings alike could be pilgrims.
So we know the narrator not by his vocation, but by his avocations: writer and pilgrim. Why not short-circuit this elaborate search for textual clues as to what the narrator does, and just equate him with Chaucer? After all, the narrator and Chaucer are both literate, so they belong to a relatively small segment of Medieval society and are likely to have had similar interests, jobs, and education. Also, to Chaucer's contemporary audience, Chaucer and the narrator could have been one; it's possible that Chaucer read his own poems aloud to the court.
But while Chaucer's hearers may have conflated him with the narrator, we can't know exactly how. It's impossible to question an audience that's been dead for 600 years, and without ...
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his works aloud, there is one piece of circumstantial evidence. It is simply that many other authors read their own works out loud, so there's no reason to suppose Chaucer didn't(2). Of course, though the narrator of the Canterbury Tales might have had an audience, he wouldn't necessarily have had the apparently noble one pictured in the frontispiece. Recitations appealed to the citizenry and peasants as well, and the entertainers made their livings off that fact(3).
A significant difference between modern writers and Medieval ones is that Medieval authors made no money with their pens(3). Only scriveners (copyists) made money from writing. For authors, there was no market and no ...
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Canterbury Tales: Who Is The Narrator?. (2006, December 22). Retrieved April 25, 2024, from http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Canterbury-Tales-Who-Is-The-Narrator/57507
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"Canterbury Tales: Who Is The Narrator?." Essayworld.com. December 22, 2006. Accessed April 25, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Canterbury-Tales-Who-Is-The-Narrator/57507.
"Canterbury Tales: Who Is The Narrator?." Essayworld.com. December 22, 2006. Accessed April 25, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Canterbury-Tales-Who-Is-The-Narrator/57507.
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