Chaucer's Canterbury Tales: Narrator, Context, and Enduring Legacy

The Narrator's Voice in The Canterbury Tales

The pilgrim narrator in The Canterbury Tales, as in other narrative works (written in verse), speaks of what he has dreamed, read, or seen in a manner which the reader soon learns to recognize as characteristic—the author's own voice. The Chaucer of all these poems is a retiring, bookish man, with little first-hand experience of life, least of all in the great matter of love. He can therefore do no better than report faithfully what he dreams, reads, or observes of the world and its ways.

Often he is puzzled by what he finds, and at times he even apologizes for what he is forced (for some reason) to report. Since the "matter" of his stories is not of his own making, it cannot always be to his taste. He cannot be blamed for "immoral" issues. He must not be blamed. It embarrasses him, purportedly, to report tales of deviant sexuality, for example, of a woman's infidelity, but, he tells us, he cannot omit this kind of reality from his faithful record of the pilgrims' performances. This is, of course, a mask, often a comic one: It creates the illusion of a free-standing, independent reality which surpasses the poet's own understanding.

Genesis and Context of The Canterbury Tales

Inspired by Boccaccio, Geoffrey Chaucer began The Canterbury Tales around 1387 and probably continued to work on it until the end of his life. The narrative is set against the backdrop of a famous pilgrim road that led from London to Canterbury, where a renowned English saint, Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury, had been murdered in his cathedral in 1170.

The Framing Device and Literary Parallels

Medieval pilgrims were notorious storytellers, and Chaucer ingeniously used a fictitious pilgrimage as a framing device for a number of stories. Collections of stories linked by such a device were common in the later Middle Ages. The most famous medieval framing tale besides Chaucer's is Boccaccio's Decameron, in which ten different narrators each tell a tale a day for ten days.

The Decameron contains tales with plots analogous to plots in The Canterbury Tales, but these stories were widespread, and there is no proof that Chaucer directly sourced them from Boccaccio.

Chaucer's Grand Vision and Enduring Legacy

Chaucer's original plan for The Canterbury Tales was grandiose:

• Some thirty pilgrims
• Each to tell two tales on the road to Canterbury
• And two on the way back to London
• Giving a total of 120 tales in all.

Of these, Chaucer's literary executors found only twenty-four among the poet's papers after his death in 1400. Despite the unfulfilled scope, these tales became an instant and lasting success. In these tales, Chaucer achieved his aim: to match the variety of pilgrims with a corresponding range of narrative genres, both secular and religious, high and low. For example, there are courtly romances (representing the upper literary end) and comic tales (representing the lower end).