The strongest irony comes when he explains that ‘avarice’ (greed) is his own vice and at the same time the vice he preaches against with such powerful effect that he brings people to repent of their avarice sincerely (but not himself, he is glad to note). His only concern is that, realizing their sinfulness, they give him money to benefit from his pardons. All the money he gets he seems to regard as his own and he explains that he does not intend to be like Christ's apostles who worked hard with their hands; he does not care if he takes from very poor people, so that their children starve, so long as he can enjoy himself. He ends by stressing the irony: he himself is 'a full vicious man; yet he can tell a moral tale.
As the sermon (the Tale) begins, we become aware that there is an additional layer of irony. The sermon he preaches is not only against love of money as such, it first attacks all the 'tavern sins' of lechery, gluttony, drunkenness, which are allied with gambling (a way of getting money without work) and blasphemous swearing, which leads finally to anger, lying, and murder. Before the Prologue began, in the link passage providing the transition from the Physician's Tale to the Pardoner's Prologue, the Host asks the Pardoner to tell 'some mirth or japes' ('solas'). His response is to insist that he must have a drink in an alehouse first. The pilgrims reject the Host's suggestion and demand 'some moral thing' from which they may learn ('sentence'). The Pardoner accepts their request, but he prepares for it by having a drink. He is not only guilty of avarice, but also of frequenting taverns.
The Pardoner's opening denunciation of the tavern sins gains its force by two main strategies. First, he evokes the ugliness associated with each of the sins, provoking physical disgust; in addition he uses exclamations (apostrophe) to denounce the sins. Second, he lards his sermon with biblical and classical references, giving examples of the sin and its punishment or quotations attacking it.
He finally intervenes to indicate the start of what he considers to be his 'Tale' although his sermon has begun long before. The Tale is the central, developed exemplum forming the central 'punch' of his attack on avarice. It is the well-known tale of the three 'riotours' who end up killing each other for greed.
This exemplum is widely admired (like the Miller's Tale) for the sheer artistry of its composition. It develops far beyond the strict demands of its sermon-frame, as can be seen from the entire opening section, in which the riotours are confronted by the personification of Death and set out with drunken bravado, like knights on a fantastic adventure, to kill Death. This serves to bring them face to face with the Old Man at the stile who longs to die (because his life is over and his conscience is at peace), who chides them for their violent language and insulting attitude, then prays that God will bring them to repentance as he directs them toward the grove where, he says, Death awaits them.
None of this is strictly necessary, all that is required is: "One day three friends discovered a pile of treasure hidden in a forest." The accumulation of detail, particularly the much- discussed Old Man, serves to bring increased irony (even poetic and religious depth) to the exemplum that then follows its familiar course to the disaster. The story is an exemplum illustrating not so much the text "Greed is the root of all evil" as the (unquoted) text "the wages of sin is death".
The Pardoner continues his memorized sermon to its standard conclusion which includes an invitation to come up and make offerings to receive the pardons. When this is done he turns triumphantly to the Pilgrims: "And lo, sires, thus I preach." This ought to be the end, only he cannot stop there. He may be thought to see that his Tale has had its usual effect that the Pilgrims too are pondering deeply on their own forms of greed. He sees an occasion to make some extra money and (being greedy) cannot resist it. He becomes the eager salesman and forgets that he has begun by treating the Pilgrims as sharers in his secrets (which includes his contempt of the gullible people who believe his descriptions of his 'relics').
He pinpoints the Host (who keeps a tavern) as most likely to be feeling guilty of tavern sins and tries to pressure him. The result is a dispute that the Knight has to resolve, by forcing the Host and the Pardoner to kiss so that an atmosphere of harmony and mirth ('let us laugh and play') can be restored.
The main interest of the Pardoner's Prologue and Tale, taken as a whole, is the complexity of the irony. In the overall exploration of the functions of sentence and solas in the Canterbury Tales, we see here how a Tale can contain deep sentence and yet be told by a teller who is completely untouched by it, so firmly committed he is to the opposite values. The Pardoner has composed this wonderfully powerful Tale (sermon) in such a way as to move his hearers to the utmost. Only his motivation in doing this is not love (a desire to save them from their sins) but vice (a desire to make them anxious so that they give him much money).
This recalls the classical debate about whether a deed can be termed a 'good action' if it is done for bad reasons, with evil intentions. The Pardoner's Prologue and Tale confronts us with the question (already posed in other ways by the Miller's Tale) as to what makes a 'good' story. Can a 'good tale' (a potentially prize-winning one) be termed 'good' when it is told by such a shameless scoundrel for entirely selfish and indeed sinful reasons? Is this nonetheless a 'moral tale'?
Such questions make it clear that Chaucer was sensitive to the role of the reader / hearer in the interpretation and evaluation of texts. The complexities of response to the Pardoner's tale-telling may be compared to the equally complex responses provoked by the Clerk's Tale, be it within the text, or among its readers. The Pardoner is a prime example of one who refuses to listen, whose folly or disbelief (which is it?) is such that he firmly opts for this world's petty happiness ('Nay, I wol drynke licour of the vyne / And have a joly wench in every toun.' And to hell with hell!
From the beginning of the story the three rioters are bent on not only seeking Death so as to quench their curiosity, as is depicted in the original tales, but to seek their revenge on Death for having killed a friend. Their purpose is set from the outset. Likewise, the warnings against their mission are explicit, and from these warnings it is made clear that it is sacrilegious to seek Death. By rejecting the warnings and seeking Death, it is clear that the three rioters are committing the sin of pride which, in terms of medieval thought, is the source of all evil, the root of the Tree of Vice.
Some critics say that the rioters, torn between pride in seeking to kill death and avarice in lusting after gold, choose the latter. For these critics, avarice is the theme. Betty Kantor suggests that the choices are not true alternatives. By refusing to heed the warnings, the rioters reject Truth on its own merits. Instead, they choose the lesser good, the satisfaction of their pride, and they die a spiritual death. Their pride dims their perception of good, making the sin of avarice easier to commit than it otherwise would be.
We are first introduced to the pardoner in the General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales. We learn a bit about him through the description that we are provided with in terms of his appearance.
We learn that ‘this pardoner hadde heer as yellow as wex, But smoothe it heeng as dooth a strike of flex’. Although he is a man, having long hair that ‘shuldres overspradde, But thinne it lay, by colpons oon on oon’.
The pardoner seems like a character who doesn’t want to sexually mature ‘no berd hadde he, ne nevere sholde have’.
Addressing the initial question, one can say that the pardoner although presents himself as a preacher,
