Chaucers Canterbury Tales - The Miller’s Tale and the Life of Christ E

The Millers Tale and the flavour of Christ When Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales, he created a great majority of the individual tales by borrowing and re gaining material from various sources. Most of these stories would realise been very beaten(prenominal) to his medieval consultation, and the changes he made in the standard version of these tales for his work would have been a form of tacit communication that would have added an spear carrier dimension to each of them. Howard says that ... the tales possess a relatedness of their own within a world of other texts. They can be understood only with fiber to divided up formulas of language or generic traits... (448). In the Millers tale Chaucer parodies the Knights Tale, which itself was fitting from a longer tale ... from Italy ... from Boccaccio (Howard 448), by combining and satirizing highly immaterial references to the life of Jesus Christ with the story of Oedipus to make the tale as bawdy and comical as possible. Th e Millers tale introduces a carpenter, prank, his wife, Alison, and a pupil lodger, Nicholas. The identification of can as a carpenter immediately causes the audience to relate these characters to another famous carpenter and his wife, namely, Joseph and Mary from the Bible. (quote) The character of John is similar to Joseph not only because of their shared profession, but also because of the shared situations with their wives before marriage. Chaucer mentions how it was a rather rash move for John to link up Alison, a woman much younger than he. He says He cleverness have known, were Cato on his shelf,/A man should marry someone deal himself (89). Just as Joseph was wary of marrying Mary because she was already pregnant such(prenominal) that he did not want to expose her to p... ...t flood, cuts loose the ropes holding his tubful to the ceiling and falls to the ground, breaking his arm in the process. The ridicule that John receives from the neighbors who have been told by Alison and Nicholas that he is insane, serves to create enough of a bliss as to symbolize Christs resurrection. The triumph would not have been nearly as dramatic if it had merely consisted of Nicholass recovery or Absalons defeat because it would not have fulfilled Nicholass main goal of killing his father and marrying his mother. Works CitedChaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales. England Penguin Books, 1977.Howard, Donald R. Chaucer His Life, His Works, His World. saucy York E. P. Dutton, 1987.New International Version. Holy Bible. Michigan Zondervan Bible Publishers, 1988.Wilson, A. N. Jesus A Life. New York W. W. Norton & Company, 1992.