The Role of Quiting in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales Essay -- Canterb

The Role of Quiting in Chaucers The Canterbury tales In Chaucers, The Canterbury Tales, many characters express the desire to cook up back some other pilgrim for their tale. The function of quiting gives us insights into the ways in which Chaucer painted the social fabric of his world. The characters of the buck, the moth miller, and the Reeve, all seem to take part in a tournament of speech. The role of quiting in The Canterbury Tales serves to allow the characters themselves to transcend their own social class, and class-based moral expectations, in order to gain power over mountain of higher social strata.(Hallissy 41) Throughout each prologue of the first three tales, we can see a clear description of the social rank of each speaker. The Knight is clearly the person to start the Tale cycle, as he belongs to the highest class of all the Pilgrims. By following the Knight, the Miller usurps the Monks privilege to put the next tale, and begins one of his own. The Miller is all owed by the Host to use the pretense of being drunk, and proceeds to tell a story which goes against social conventions by drone fun at the rules and regulations of a higher social class. The Reeve then follows the Millers Tale with one of his own. Osewold tries to quit the Millers Tale by telling the story concerning Symkyn. The progression from the Knight to the Miller to the Reeve, gives us a picture of three very different class-levels. Through their speech, however, the lower-class characters of the Miller and Reeve are allowed to comment and pass judgement on people without fear of the socially-constructed class system. In his Prologue, the Miller seems to be driven by a kind of anger directed at the ending of the Knights s... ...o meaning within the world of the mind. A lowly Miller has as a great deal right to quit a Knight as anyone does. The battle instead, becomes one of inner strength, where the contestants are not defined by social roles, but by the quality and passi on of their beliefs. Works Cited and ConsultedBrewer, Derek. Tradition and Innovation in Chaucer. London Macmillan, 1982. Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales. In the Riverside Chaucer. Larry D. Benson, ed. Boston Houghton, 1987. Cooper, Helen. Deeper into the Reeves Tale, 1395-1670. Pp. 168-184. In Chaucer Traditions Studies in comply of Derek Brewer. Ruth Morse and Barry Windeatt, eds. Cambridge Cambridge UP, 1990. Delasanta, Rodney. The Millers Tale Revisited. Chaucer Review 31.3 (1997), 209-231. Hallissy, Margaret. Codes of Conduct in The Canterbury Tales. Connecticut Greenwood, 1993.