The Pardoner’s Performance, or How Do We Know What We Know About the Pardoner?

Chaucer’s innovation in the Pardoner’s performance tests our concept of dramatic irony by suggesting information regarding the Pardoner’s sexuality, gender identity, and spirituality, major categories in the politics of identity, without confirming that information. Our presumed understanding of the Pardoner as a character lacks substantiation. As we learn about the Pardoner through the narrator’s eyes and ears, we look to fit the “noble ecclesiaste” (l. 708) into the figure shaped by our own prejudices and perceptions, as any active reader must do. But the Pardoner, ever aware of his audience, does not offer clear clues to his personality. This break between what the other characters say about the Pardoner and what the Pardoner says about himself has been a major source of tension for all readers of the Tales and especially critics who search for substantiation of their views beyond the Chaucer’s own language. The general tone of the Canterbury Tales is comic. After all, the pilgrims are traveling to the shrine St. Thomas Beckett in a public act of holy reverence, but the Tales take a darker turn when the Pardoner is brought to the foreground. The whole Canterbury Tales is a collected set of performances, stories told about telling stories. As Joseph Ganim has written, theatricality, by which he means “a governing sense of performance, an interplay among the author’s voice, his fictional characters, and his immediate audience,” is “a paradigm for the Chaucerian poetic” (5). This paper shall endeavor to show that the major effect of the Pardoner’s presence in the Tales is to focus the reader’s attention to questions of performance and performativity, literary perception, and the unstable relations between language, and more specifically art, and the self. This essay will be as much a critical discussion of Chaucerian criticism as an interpretation of the Pardoner for much of our current understandings of the Pardoner and his performance come from nearly six hundred years of scholarship on the subject.

What exactly do we now about the Pardoner? Much of our understanding of him as a literary human being rests on several key descriptive statements in the text, most about his appearance. They fail, however, to paint as full a portrait as we would like, but these descriptions amount to a generally negative picture. The General Prologue offers a first impression of the Pardoner which has affected his interpreted characterization to this day. The narrator, having met with each of the pilgrims and learned something of their characters, offers a portrait of each of them before the tales begin. In his description of the Pardoner, the narrator notes his traveling companion, his most prominent physical features (including his questionable sexuality), his “newe jet” fashion (l. 682), his relics, and his professional status.

One focus of much criticism of the past fifty years has been the Pardoner’s sexuality/gender identity. The narrator explicitly uses animal imagery in his portrait of the Pardoner, comparing him to a “hare” (l. 684), “a goot” (l. 688), and “a geldying or a mare” (l. 691), suggesting that the Pardoner is “something subhuman” (Faulkner 4). These animals were also figuratively indicative of sexual abnormality in medieval times. The most troubling line is the narrator’s: “I trowe he were a gelding or a mare” (l. 691). The line is troublesome because the words do not gloss easily. Benson notes the line’s complex mixture of subjective interpretation of gendered signs, metaphorical assertion (the Pardoner is like a neutered horse…), and contradiction (“he is either a eunuch or a homosexual”) (46). Critics have been quick to take the narrator at his word on this point while recognizing his equivocation and irony when describing other pilgrims. The Pardoner’s indeterminate sexual nature begs the question of the reliability of the narrator. The narrator “appears” to be a disinterested, unbiased observer of the pilgrims in their journey, faithfully trying to make clear his plan “To telle yow al the condicioun/ Of ech of hem” (l. 38-9), but his humble qualification that the portrait he paints is “as it semed me” (l. 39) emphasizes the obfuscation that exists between the perception and the use of language to convey the perception. He is the tales’ first performer. The narrator, who “hadde . . . spoken with hem everichon” (l. 31), acts as the sieve through whom we come to know the characters. His tale is his own retelling of his perceptions of the pilgrims, not an objective portrait of the motley lot. His three categories of description – each pilgrim’s general circumstance, attire, and social status – limit his role to observer of appearances. And the Pardoner, as a master performer cunningly aware of his audience, was figuratively born to supply an appearance that will earn as much monetary reward as possible. HuppÃ?© calls the narrator’s line “gossiping curiosity” and notes that “he is not aroused to any personal comment on the Pardoner’s evil ways” (24). In fact, as we will later find, the Pardoner is quite willing to reveal his own sins to his pilgrim audience.

As several critical studies have shown, his interpretation of the Pardoner’s sexuality is at best ambiguous. Rather than investigate the origins of the Host’s and the narrator’s (mis)readings of the Pardoner, critics have accepted their comments as indicative of the Pardoner’s sexual deviance, either physical or social. All of the phrases interpreted as evidence of the Pardoner’s sexuality and sex are ambiguous in the context of the language of the poem itself. The phrase “beel amy” of line 318 is regularly regarded as a homophobic jibe at the Pardoner, but the phrase also means simply “rascal” or “knave” (Ross 35).

Despite the diversity of interpretations, we can say that the text does convey some sense of sexual abnormality about the Pardoner. As Helen Cooper indicates, “Chaucer himself implies abnormality or perversion but refuses to predicate any specific Ã?¯Ã?¿Ã?½reality’ behind it” (59). Whether he is a hermaphrodite, a homosexual, an overzealous (“effeminate”) heterosexual, or a eunuch, the text fails to fully disclose. In this sense, we can say the Pardoner is sexually abject or queer. There is not enough textual evidence to determine whether he is any of these and all are attractively argued today. His perceived sexual abnormality has been an attractive topic of critical inquiry in the field of gender/queer studies for this reason. As with such matters in popular culture, we ache to know sexual secrets of celebrities, and the Pardoner is no less a celebrity in literature as political candidates on their pilgrimage to office. The narrator’s naming of his sexual abnormality is his misreading of the culturally determined signs that his culture interprets as such. “In any event,” writes Gordan Hall Gerould, “Chaucer pretends to no expert knowledge. His surmise was based on appearance: the effeminacy of the Pardoner’s smooth yellow hair and his dress, the quality of his voice” (59). Sedgewick concurs in his assertion that the Pardoner is a eunuch: “this is what everybody, medieval or modern, would Ã?¯Ã?¿Ã?½trowe’ him to be from his appearance and voice alone” (130). Similarly, Monica McAlpine argues that “the physical description, once it is set in the context of medieval sexual theory, seems to me to provide the strongest evidence of the Pardoner’s possibly homosexuality, which in turn helps us both to recognize a possible implication of his association with the Summoner and to gloss Ã?¯Ã?¿Ã?½mare'” (114). Carolyn Dinshaw interprets the Pardoner as a eunuch and extends this interpretation of physical lack to his social relations and his delivery of his tale. “The Pardoner,” she writes, “is defined by absence – he’s a not-man or not even that – and it is in this fundamental sense that I shall take him to be a eunuch, a figurative one if not in fact a literal one as well. His sense of his own lack informs his social behavior, his interactions with other; his incompleteness, moreover, informs the very thematics and narrative strategies of his Tale” (158).

Most critics fail to realize that in medieval times effeminacy connotes rambunctious heterosexuality in men, an excessive interest in and desire for women. Following this line, another critic offers another perspective on the Pardoner’s sexuality. Richard Green argues that Chaucer’s use of the legend of the soiled pants confused with a holy relic was present in several medieval tales throughout Europe and the overwhelming suggestion that these tales make is that the owner of these pants is excessively heterosexual, a cleric pursuing adulterous relations with parishioners: “If Chaucer, consciously or otherwise, is making the Host echo an incident from the story of Ã?¯Ã?¿Ã?½The Friar’s Pants’ when he launches into his diatribe against the Pardoner, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the Pardoner is here being cast mentally in the role of philanderer” (145). We also have the Pardoner’s own reference to his having “a joly wenche in every toun” (l. 453) in his Prologue. HuppÃ?© writes that “The boast is curious; does he expect thereby to hide from his audience his infirmity? Or is he simply exacerbating his sore by arrogantly calling attention to what might otherwise pass without comment? It is possible that he is doing both – pretending to himself, but knowing that it is pretense” (215). We demand that the Pardoner “be” homosexual while we ignore contradictory or ambiguous textual evidence. In a well-argued study that at times breaks with much of twentieth century Chaucerian criticism by not beginning with an overtly homophobic prejudice, Monica McAlpine notes that the infamous line is not the narrator’s only comment on the Pardoner and that his profession, his appearance, and his talent for preaching are equally important to our understanding of his character: “The narrator sets an example of not reducing the Pardoner to his sexuality, an example that at other levels of response Chaucer means us to emulate” (115). Rather than accuse the narrator of rabid homophobia, a response anachronistic to the text at hand, McAlpine believes “he is rather like the modern person who has not mastered the distinctions among homosexuals, bisexuals, transvestites, and transsexuals” (114), again reemphasizing the distance between what one sees and what one is. As we can see, the question of the Pardoner’s sexuality remains unanswered.

Chaucer’s Pardoner joins a list of fictional persons throughout Western literature, including Mary Magdalene of the Bible, Viola of Twelfth Night, Coleridge’s Christabel, the Tiresias of “The Waste Land,” and Nabakov’s Humbert Humbert, whose vivacity and power lie in the tense relation of sexuality and morality that forms their characters. One of the most striking peculiarities of the Pardoner’s character, according to Sedgewick, has been Chaucer’s “combination of pardoner and eunuchus in one person” (131). The Pardoner is also a “noble ecclesiaste” (l. 708) who draws in the faithful to repentance while committing deception and fraud upon them. The social figure of the Pardoner elicits the stock response of suspicion, disgust, and moral outrage among medieval and modern audiences alike. As a trope for ecclesiastical deviance, the historical pardoner stained the pristine dogma of the medieval Christian church, voiding the sacred heart of the Church’s work for material gain. On the way “fro the court of Rome” (l. 671), his first act in the narrator’s tale is to sing the refrain of a popular song, immediately confirming the reader’s suspicions of this stock figure. The Pardoner and the Summoner, spiritual con men both, offer up their appearances for the narrator’s imagination. He is excessively preoccupied with his appearance, as well he should be as a performer. In order to be a good performer, he must look like a good performer. He must stand out in his crowd. Perhaps taking advantage of the sexual abnormality which has drawn the narrator’s comment “I trowe he were a geldying or a mare,” he adorns himself with attractive attire, and indeed with holy relics, so as to indulge even more attention. His dress, merely one feature of his performative nature, overcompensates for the mysterious lack, physical, sexual, or spiritual, from which he has suffered in the critical mind.

His clothing is another critical trope for the deceptive appearance of the Pardoner. Carolyn Dinshaw finds a great deal of existential meaning in her interpretation of the Pardoner’s fashion consciousness: “the Pardoner opens out another – unnerving – possible hermeneutic significance of the image of the body swaddled in veils: there is perhaps nothing underneath those cloaks of representation. There might be nothing but veils and letters covering a fundamental absence, a radical lack of meaning or truth” (157). I tend to regard such an interpretation as melodramatic for surely the Pardoner, as the source of such radical misreadings, is not nothing.

Chaucer makes clear the nature of the Pardoner’s Tale as a performance, not only as one of the fifty-eight tales the pilgrims will tell on their journey to and from Canterbury, but as the Pardoner’s own recreation of a performance he may give on any other occasion to make his living. As Robert Jordan has noted, “More than any of the other Canterbury pilgrims, the Pardoner encourages the realist assumption that the pilgrims are Ã?¯Ã?¿Ã?½alive’ and existentially distinct from the tales they tell” (136). The Pardoner makes his performance known explicitly and even proudly early in his Prologue. He warns his audience that, despite “A voys . . . as small as hath a goot” (l. 688), he takes pains to speak loudly so that all may hear the sermons that “I kan al by rote” (l. 332). Calling further attention to his efforts at performance, he reveals the theme of all his sermons: “Radix malorum est Cupiditas” (l. 334). Warren Ginsberg warns that “the Pardoner is an avaricious man, and his many words confess the fact more than he knows” (72). The Pardoner’s naming of his own sin, his own avaricious intentions, and his own crafty methods recalls the standard mode of the morality play’s Vice figure, as Helen Cooper notes (260). The difference is the Pardoner’s self-revelation is entirely for his own gain and has nothing to do with his audience’s salvation. Indeed, he does not care if, when the poor souls die, “hir soules goon a-blakeberyed” (l. 406).

Critics such as Harold Bloom locate Chaucer’s strength as a poet in his vivid creation of character who create themselves through language: “What they say to others, and to themselves, partly reflects what they already are, but partly engenders also that they will be” (3).

One of the major points of contention in today’s Chaucerian criticism is the dispute between linguistically- and rhetorically-oriented interpretations of the characters as rhetorical effects of Chaucer’s conscious manipulation of language and psychologically-oriened studies that treat the pilgrims as dramatic characters. Beginning in this century with Kittredge, we find the critics responding to the Pardoner and indeed all the pilgrims as personalities that can be separated from the context of the tales. As member of the rhetorical critics, Marshall Leicester argues that “the tales must be treated not as the performances of preexisting selves but as texts. They are not written to be spoken, like a play, but written to be read as if they were spoken” (13). Part of the allure of great literature, however, is its capacity to approximate an image of ourselves through creative characterization. We respond more passionately and intimately to fictional people than we do to mere words and sentences, however finely woven.

A great deal has been written on the meaning of the Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale. I shall leave the interpretations to others and focus my attention on their other function as performance by the Pardoner. I would, however, like to point out several features of the Prologue and Tale which inform my discussion of the Pardoner’s performativity. The dominant feature of the Prologue is its superfluity. Packed with lists, laments, threats, and famous names, the first part’s form connotes urgency and speed, Benson suggests (52-3). The Pardoner’s delivery of the Prologue is fragmentary and disconnected, never allowing his audience a moment to reflect on what he has said. We can expect that non-verbal signals would accompany such a performance. Unable to think on the Pardoner’s words, we must respond emotionally. His language in preparing his audience for his mock-sermon and tale emphasize a concern with his performance as a performance. Stephen Knight admits “this tale demands” performance “more than most . . .” (128). The overarching theme of the Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale, as stated in my thesis, is the distinction between the performer and the performance, a distinction which Yeats problematizes between “the dancer and the dance”. Our knowledge of the Pardoner’s avaricious intentions, told by himself, gives away to the oratorical extravagance of his work. At the heart of the Pardoner’s Tale, Leicester notes, is “a failure or refusal to distinguish carefully and consistently between literal and spiritual levels of meaning and discourse” ( 38). The melodramatic lamentations that color his Tale are emotional icing to the simple, yet effective story of the three rioters:

O glotonye, ful of cursednesse!
O cause first of oure confusioun!
O original of oure dampnacioun . . . (ll. 490-500)

O glotonye, on thee wel oghte us pleyne!
O, wiste a man how manye maladyes
Folwen of excesse and of glotonyes . . . (ll. 512-3)

“These sudden bursts of mechanical emotionalism,” Benson argues, “contain little moral seriousness or artistic taste, but they might well arrest the attention of an unsophisticated audience” (53). Most of the Pardoner’s presentation lacks the substance necessary to achieve his desired results, and so he turns to the delivery of the presentation itself (Harrington 37). The strength of the Pardoner’s verbal project is its forcefulness rather than its substance.

The Pardoner concludes the Tale with the much-cited claim “I wol yow nat deceyve” (918), a deliberately ambiguous statement that perfectly fits the Pardoner’s character and performance for the statement is both true and false in its diversity of connotations on multiple performative levels. The statement is not the “very paroxysm of agonized sincerity” that Kittredge famously claims, but is the exact point at which the Pardoner’s character and his performance converge. In this moment, the statement is truth and falsehood, appearance and reality, performer and performance are devoid of any intellectual meaning. The emotive impact of the statement, the verbal climax of the Pardoner’s performance in the Canterbury Tales, renders the pilgrims silent with a mixture of horror and contempt. The line has had a similar effect on critics unable to find a definite meaning. Helen Cooper describes the Pardoner as “a character within his own tale” ( 266), introducing himself as a weak speaker who must strain his voice to be heard (l. 329-332). By introducing himself as the speaker of his own tale, the Pardoner clears the way to manipulate himself in front of the audience’s gullible eyes and ears. In describing his own actions and intentions in his Prologue, the Pardoner becomes “the first exegetical critic of his own tale” (Leicester 39).

Many critics have tried to interpret the Pardoner’s Sermon and Exemplum in terms of the literary tradition of the sermon. But the Pardoner is not following the sermon tradition. He is instead manipulating that tradition, using its conventions and rhetorical strategies to further his ultimate goal of cheating the “lewed” audience out of their money. “Even though the Pardoner’s sermon on the tavern sins echoes phrases, imagery, and themes from authoritative medieval works, we should not therefore conclude that Chaucer meant us to read it as a serious exposition of Christian thought” (Benson 56). The Pardoner sounds more like an actor reciting lines remembered from previous performances than a true Church official offering a moral lesson. He employs his skill in employing the features and conventions of the medieval sermon tradition to his own obsessive ends, all the while becoming “more conscious of himself and more aware of both his power and his powerlessness” (44). His power in this case is his power of persuasion, the dangerous use of language against which Plato warns. His powerlessness is the instability of the performance, the constant threat that his performance will be seen for the lie that it is.

Besides being “a moral thyng” with meaning unto itself, the Tale is also a vehicle for the Pardoner’s self-revelation. So many studies have explored the aspects of the Pardoner to be found in the tale that it is unnecessary for me to offer my insights. One example that Leicester offers for our purposes is the way the sermon “keeps associating the sins it describes with the Pardoner, showing that he is guilty of them” (43). The Old Man, perhaps one of the most diversely interpreted figures in all of literature, has long been seen by many to be an embodiment of the Pardoner and his sin of cupiditas. The anonymity and impersonality of the rioters reinforces the poem’s theme throughout, the evasion of identity through performance. To name someone or something is an attempt at stability and permanence, the locating of an essential nature to human personality. The Pardoner’s sermon, his tale, and his character, as described by the narrating pilgrim, all speak to the evasiveness and illusion of identity as a social concept. The conclusion of the Tale, the violent result of the Pardoner’s telling of the Tale, and the general literary reaction to the Pardoner’s occupation emphasize the danger inherent to unstable identity.

We must not forget that the Pardoner makes his living by his ability to perform. He is thereby at a distinct advantage in the story-telling competition set up by the Host. He is no amateur at delivering a convincing sermon, as he boasts in the Prologue. He has a set routine he follows in delivering his performances: first, he tells from whence he has come; then, he shows his papal bulls as evidence of his religious authority; he might flavor his already notable appearance with “a wordes fewe” “in Latyn” to paint him as a learned man (l. 344); then, she offers his relics for the audience’s inspection (for a price). If the Pardoner has faith, it is a faith in the rhetorical force of his own performance, as he demonstrates when he reveals his other-than-holy intentions to defraud his listeners of their “pens, or elles grotes” (l. 376). “As I create myself through language,” he believes, “so do I shape my sinful listener into a believer by making him aware of his own sinfulness through making my own sinful self the subject of my sermon.” He is a professional magician of words who suffers muted outrage when the truth of his conjuring is discovered. I read the Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale as a routine performance of his job duties. On this particular occasion, however, the Pardoner is caught up in his own performance. His over-confidence in his own talents, his greed, and his negative self-concept culminate in a terrible moment when the performance moves beyond his control. Leonard Koff suggests that “The Pardoner may not be evil so much as bold – bold with language because he is bold with the idea of language as skill, and performance as making. He distinguishes motive from deed and forthrightly raises the question fo the moral efficacy of language considered as technique pure and simple” (166). Manipulated by the Pardoner, language is a weapon.

The conclusion of the tale of the three rioters, of course, should not be read as the end of his performance. The real end of his performance is the presentation of relics and the collection of money, but the boisterous Host steps up to deny the Pardoner his final glory. The Pardoner is so angry with the Host because the Host refuses to participate in the Pardoner’s self-conscious performance. The Pardoner’s raison d’etre is his capacity to perform for an audience and the effects of this performance are the audience’s responses to this preaching, their purchase of pardons and their fee for touching the relics. The bold Host recognizes the Pardoner to be too slick for his own game and violently refuses to play. Following the spoiling of his story, the Pardoner slinks away in Iago-like silence. Without his performance, the Pardoner is nothing. The Pardoner concludes the Tale with the much-cited claim “I wol yow nat deceyve” (918), a deliberately ambiguous statement that perfectly fits the Pardoner’s character and performance for the statement is both true and false in its diversity of connotations on multiple performative levels. The statement is not the “very paroxysm of agonized sincerity” that Kittredge famously claims, but is the exact point at which the Pardoner’s character and his performance converge. In this moment, the statement is truth and falsehood, appearance and reality, performer and performance are devoid of any intellectual meaning. The emotive impact of the statement, the verbal climax of the Pardoner’s performance in the Canterbury Tales, renders the pilgrims silent with a mixture of horror and contempt. The line has had a similar effect on critics unable to find a definite meaning.

Chaucer blesses the Pardoner with a distinct performative style and technique. What was once considered “the monstrous cynicism of the Pardoner’s confessions” is now more generally recognized as the rhetorical effect of his performance (Kittredge 151). The Pardoner’s abject, spectacular life offer the raw material for the emotional force of his tale. Forced to live by what he swindles from the faithful, he probably has performed this and similar sermons many times in his life. Consumed by greed, he refines his talents to yield greater fruits from his listeners’ repentance. Like an actor who studies the habit and condition of the character he is to portray, the Pardoner is versed in at least a basic understanding of Christian theology, classic learning, and rhetorical strategies. As a socially recognizable sexually abnormal person in a most despised occupation, the Pardoner is no doubt aware of the effects and the extent of evil and malice. At the extreme of negative assessments of the Pardoner, Ruth Nevo claims “the Pardoner stands at the outer pale of Chaucer’s tolerance for humanity. He is a concentrate of the maximum hypocrisy. He is parasite of parasites” (20). His selfishness, coupled with a knowledge of evil drawn perhaps from his personal experience, “works to enable him not to choose the good but to exploit it” among his listeners (Cooper 263). The Pardoner reveals his fundamental sin is cupiditas, always the subject of his preaching. His great talent is his ability to weave a fabulous tale from his own sinful despair. The Pardoner’s cupiditas finds active expression in the rioters, writes Benson, discovering two terrible effects: “the revelers’ separation from God and from each other (the opposite of Jesus’s twin commands to love God and one’s neighbor) . . .” (61).

The Pardoner is a practical rhetorician, mastering diverse ways of persuading an audience to act as he wishes. “The essence of his being,” Benson argues, “is his misuse of the art of preaching for profit” (47-8). When called to tell his tale, the pilgrims, fearful of his acknowledged power with language, bid him “Telle us som moral thyng” (l. 325). No amateur, he is ready to preach at the first scent of financial reward and his decision to drink “a draughte of moyste and corny ale” while he “thynke/ Upon som honest thyng” is purely intended for theatrical effect. Like a good showman, he knows the value of the dramatic pause. “He knows plenty of moral things,” Sedgewick believes, “but to tell one as such is completely out of his character and habit; and what is more, he knows the Pilgrims know that also” (144-5).

What effect does the Pardoner have on us as readers? The Pardoner has many audiences: the “lewed peple” (l. 437) who pay him for pardons, his fellow Canterbury pilgrims, the reader of Chaucer’s poem. The Pardoner adapts his presentation with each re-reading to the benefit of his audience. In Leicester’s view, “Chaucer conceives and represents the act of storytelling as the encounter of a subject with an institution” (25). In the present case, the institutions are the Holy Church itself and the sermon tradition. Because the knowledge of the boundaries and definitions of these institutions are already in the minds of his audience, the Pardoner can easily tailor his performances to his audience’s expectations for maximum profit. Despite making clear his avaricious intentions, the Pardoner nevertheless convinces some of the veracity of his words and the dire need for repentance. Otherwise, he would not last long as a Pardoner. I agree with H. Marshall Leicester’s assertion that “the Canterbury tales are individually voiced, and radically so – that each of the tales is primarily (in the sense of Ã?¯Ã?¿Ã?½first,’ that is, the place where one starts) an expression of its teller’s personality and outlook as embodied in the unfolding Ã?¯Ã?¿Ã?½now’ of the telling” (6). The Tale has the feel of an impromptu performance in which the speaker shapes the details as he goes along, reacting to and reinforcing audience responses as they catch his attentive eye. Following Bloom, Leicester locates the source of the reader’s understanding of the characters in the tales they tell: “The tales are examples of impersonated artistry because they concentrate not on the way preexisting persons create language but on the way language creates people” (10). The Pardoner is as much a product of his own self-expression and adaptation to his own self-expression as a conduit for Chaucer’s intentional meaning. In the violent dissociation between the speaker’s intention and the speech’s effect, Chaucer demonstrates “the potential power art has to affect an audience, an essential quality even Christian literature must have to succeed, though here used for all the wrong reasons” (Benson 50). The substance of the Pardoner’s message is never questioned by his audience, only the truth of the Pardoner.

The Pardoner, his Prologue, and his Tale are evocative emotionally, spiritually, morally, aesthetically, and as literature. The only certainty we can claim about the Pardoner is that his presence and story provoke a strong response. Koff states “I can think of no other ars poetica that links art and its use, its social value and its morality, as engagingly as the Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale. We can hardly avoid the concern of the tale – the condition of our souls” (173). In reading the Tales, we are invited into dialogue with the ideas, presumptions, and beliefs it presents. Chaucer anticipates that the intellect will not so much check as augment by tempering – be being itself – whatever responses are necessarily felt, whatever responses are left to us only after the narrative Ã?¯Ã?¿Ã?½has happened'” (171). The Noble Ecclesiaste’s fictive power is his powerful hold over our imaginations as readers. He confuses critics with a clever self-awareness that suggest our own. As Koff puts it, the Pardoner knows he is only pretending and “we are expected, indeed invited, to see through him” (162). What we see behind that fictive veil is left to the reader’s imagination. There can be no doubt that the rich diversity of meanings which countless critics have drawn from the Pardoner are possible only because of Chaucer’s masterfully woven creation. The figure of the Pardoner forces us to contemplate the performances we enact in our own lives.

Works Cited
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