Miller's Tale - Analyse the narrative structure of the tale and the effectiveness of its ending.

Stephen Blighe 5/2/2007

AS English Language and Literature

Assignment: Miller’s Tale

Analyse the narrative structure of the tale and the effectiveness of its ending. I will be summarising what information is given to the reader at each stage of the tale. How the interest of the reader is maintained, how the ending is relevant given what has gone before. To conclude I will comment on what I feel the point or theme of the tale might be.

Below is a brief summary of the main points of the Miller’s Tale, from this we can see what information the reader obtains at each stage in the story.

John, a rich old carpenter of Oxford has a young wife, the eighteen-year-old Alisoun, whom he guards carefully, for he is very jealous. He has a boarder, the clerk Nicholas, who makes advances to Alisoun; she quickly agrees and they determine to consummate the affair. Absolon, the parish clerk and village dandy, also lusts for Alisoun, but he woos her in vain, for Nicholas is there first.

Nicholas tricks John into thinking that Noah's flood is coming again; John rigs up three kneading tubs, in which he, Nicholas, and Alisoun can float until the waters recede. When the flood is due, all three climb up into the tubs. John goes to sleep; Alisoun and Nicholas go back to the bedroom. They are interrupted by Absolon, who has come to woo Alisoun at the window. She promises him a kiss and puts her backside out the window. Absolon kisses it.

He soon realizes his mistake. He gets a hot coulter (plow blade) from Gervase, the smith, and returns ...

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Nicholas tricks John into thinking that Noah's flood is coming again; John rigs up three kneading tubs, in which he, Nicholas, and Alisoun can float until the waters recede. When the flood is due, all three climb up into the tubs. John goes to sleep; Alisoun and Nicholas go back to the bedroom. They are interrupted by Absolon, who has come to woo Alisoun at the window. She promises him a kiss and puts her backside out the window. Absolon kisses it.

He soon realizes his mistake. He gets a hot coulter (plow blade) from Gervase, the smith, and returns to ask for another kiss. Nicholas puts his backside out, Absolon strikes it with the red-hot coulter, Nicholas yells for water; the carpenter awakes and thinks the flood has come, cuts lose his tub and falls and breaks his arm. The neighbors rush in, and all are convinced old John is mad.

From lines 652-746 we see the tale moving rapidly to its farcical conclusion. The finale unlocks some very amusing and quite risqué scenes that in Chaucer’s day would have been seen by a much less accepting audience than today. To summerise the finale Absolon visits his blacksmith friend who gives him a ‘hot coulter’. As an act of revenge he takes this ‘poker’ to brand Alisouns bottom, but it is not she who receives this painful punishment but Nicholas. In a cruel twist of fate he hangs his bottom out of the window for Absolon to kiss, but instead receives an unexpected surprise. This irony of this scene is immensely comic; this is due to ‘psychic release’- a common cause of amusement.

Overall the conclusion to the Miller’s Tale makes the two men look thoroughly ridiculous and humiliated; Alisoun appears to get away with her crimes and comes away looking as ‘clean as a whistle’. But the audience has seen every dark side to her character.

The readers’ interest is carefully maintained through a mixture of comedy, shocks, courtly love and ironic twists throughout the Tale. Chaucer makes the reader feel superior to the characters who seem somewhat disillusioned in their pathetic plight to get what they want without paying for the consequences. Nicholas and Alisoun plot to deceive the foolish carpenter of their nefarious doings. Absolon is blinded by his love for Alisoun, who cares nothing for him and constantly makes cruel jokes of him. All these elements help captivate the reader and pull them deep into the personalities of the characters.

I noticed that infidelity seems to run prominently as the main theme throughout the tale. There are many more themes such as love, revenge and humour which all seem equally as important. I feel that the main point of the story is that actions have consequences, something the characters did not seem to grasp until everything around them began to fall apart.