After the touching tale told by the Clerk, The Host tells the Pardoner to recount a funny story to lighten the mood a little. The Pardoner agrees and begins his tale by telling the company about how he preaches in churches. Every time he preaches, his theme is the same, which happens to be that greed is the root of all evil. In order to seem impressive in front of the congregation, the Pardoner says that he just mutters some Latin and begs them to pray for salvation. To top it all off, he pulls some "sacred relics" out of a sack to show to the people. He claims that they are the bones of saints and extols their virtues and that in order to reap the benefits of these holy relics, one would have to give him a small offering of silver. In this manner, the Pardoner tells the company how he makes the most out of his position as a clergyman.
He then proceeds to tell the story of three young men who possessed all the vices possible to be had, the worst of which being gluttony, drunkenness, gambling, and swearing or "taking the Lord's name in vain." One day, the three men are nearly dead drunk in a bar when they hear a bell which is ringing to signify that someone has died. They find out that one of their old friends has been killed by a strange fellow named Death, who has also been killing off many other people and sometimes entire villages. They get angry at this and decide to find Death and beat him up. They're drunkenly looking around for Death when they see an old man walking slowly towards them. They jeer at and insult him, but the old man remains calm and tells them that they can find Death sitting under a tree in a grove just around the bend. The three men then rush to the grove of trees and find an enormous heap of gold coins. They decide that they will split up the gold three ways, but only after one of them goes to the market and gets food and drink for all of them. The other two will stay and guard the gold. Once one of them has left, the other two plot to kill him upon his return and split the gold between themselves. Meanwhile the one at the market decides that he wants the gold all to himself, so he poisons the food meant for his two comrades. When he returns, the other two men beat him up until he's dead, upon which they eat the food that he had brought with him. The poison in the food works quickly and both of them die. At the end of his story, the Pardoner preaches the virtue of not having any of the vices that led the three men to their downfall. He tries to scam the other pilgrims into paying for absolution of sin and for the so-called relics in his sack. The Host at this point mocks him, saying that the Pardoner would tell him to kiss his (the Pardoner's) dirty underwear and claim that it was that of a saint. As everyone laughs at the Pardoner, the Knight calmly breaks up the skirmish. The Host then prevails upon the Parson to speak. As the Parson begins to tell his story, the pilgrims have made their way into a forest. Geoffrey Chaucer himself then stops his horse, dismounts, and prays as the rest of the company fades into the night. This story was left with little closure, so one can vaguely assume that the pilgrims go on to Canterbury and continue to tell their tales. If I had to write a sequel to this book, I could write it as one big narrative composed of the viewpoints of all the characters in the story at different parts of the journey. Each character's thoughts and personalities could be more clearly portrayed by including their own thoughts and feelings on the tales and the journey itself. We could also get a better idea on why they behave the way they behave through this sort of multi-perspective narrative. All the characters would be the same in this sequel; the only major difference would be in the style of narration of the stories as the perspective keeps shifting from character to character. In this sequel, the main conflict would be the same as it was in the original book, which was really just occasional prejudiced squabbles between characters. I would definitely recommend The Canterbury Tales to a friend because many of the tales told in the book are interesting to read and the way that the characters are written makes them seem very real and alive to the reader. I will be commenting on the reading blogs of Colin, Maddy T., Michael, and Matthew E.
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