Monday, October 13, 2014

Canterbury Tales Essay

There are always moments in time, that are meant to challenge our beliefs. Without a little hiccup in a constant plan, we as humans wouldn't learn to work around our obstacles. Being able to honor something is one thing, but trying to find a voice to question something is a little more challenging to do. Within Canterbury Tales, Chaucer tries to make a balance for both honoring and questioning traditions in the literary and social world. Chaucer surrounds himself in a world that is realistic but at the same time different in the use of images and symbols that he uses to portray a scene, character, or a message. Chaucer goes onto narrate the story in a questioning and ironic way to characterize and set up diction and syntax that would get his story through an aura of the struggle between doing something that is expected or straying away from the norm.
Illustrating a scene that's meant to say one thing but it might come off in a hundred different viewpoints, can be either a scary or exciting task to take on. Chaucer, during his time wrote Canterbury Tales as a book combining several different elements and types of people into a common theme that had never been done before. Life was very structured and formal during his time. For him to try to challenge the literary and social traditions of his time was a bold move. He did this using characterization, both indirect and direct to selectively separate different social classes and standards. He imported symbols into certain  aspects of the story to relay a subtle but strong moral message to make the reader question and think. Then he combined his literary techniques together with his personal insight to create tales that could've been separate stories. Instead, were combined to truly capture the essence of irony and disorder but at the same time was real and structured that embodied elements that were interchangeable to make the story come together as one piece.



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