How Did Chaucer Use The Interruption In The Pardoner's Tale

The Canterbury Tales
An Unfinished Extraordinary Work Geoffrey Chaucer set out to create a masterpiece of one-hundred and twenty tales, two from each of the thirty pilgrims on their journey to pay their respects to St. Thomas Beckett in Canterbury. Chaucer was unable to finish the masterpiece he set upon to create, but the twenty-four tales we are left with are masterpieces in their own sense in the form of The Canterbury Tales. (“Works of Geoffrey” xxviii) Geoffrey Chaucer lives on with this collection of tales that never were able to be organized in a final manner. The tales we have are not in chronological order that Geoffrey Chaucer was writing them, for some tales are identified as tales towards the beginning and some tales are distinctly
Could Chaucer just have been dissatisfied with tale he had wrote for the Squire to tell? Is this why the tale is left unfinished? Did Chaucer use the clever tactic of the Franklin interrupting the Squire to end the tale, which many consider is a whole lot of nothing? Many questions surround these two stories and how they interact with each other. Brian Lee suggests that how Chaucer uses the Franklin to interrupt the Squire undermines the whole of The Squire’s Tale. Could this be a literary tactic Chaucer used to make it as life-like as possible? Yes, but it is widely debated among scholars. It could also be a very clever way of Chaucer to not rewrite his work in the tale of the Squire and continue with other tales without having to provide a conclusion of a lesser work according to
The collection of tales will always be a mere twenty-four tales of the grand vision Chaucer held for it, but some of these tales standalone gloriously and superbly. The Wife of Bath will always be an eternal character and The Squire’s Tale will always be challenged by some critics. Some tales may have been influenced by others work and the exact order the tales were supposed to be placed may never be exact, but all this largely does not matter. Fore, the greatest piece and most original part of the tales, The General Prologue, is what makes Chaucer stand apart from the likes of Italian counterparts in Boccaccio and his Decameron. The General Prologue was shown to me in high school and we did not expand into the tales. Goes to show that The General Prologue is a great literary piece of work and the true star of Chaucer’s creation. Introducing all kinds of personalities from medieval England and describing these thirty pilgrims with more lines then any comparative work to this date. The prologue acts as a window into medieval England showing every social class, occupation, and lifestyle of the large group heading to Canterbury to visit the place of Saint Thomas Beckett. This tremendous groundbreaking introduction Chaucer created for his