He begins by advertising a private sideline having nothing to do with his work as Pardoner. He has a collection of 'sacred relics,' bones and rags for which he claims supernatural powers, able to cure sick animals, increase wealth, and make husbands trust unfaithful wives. These desirable effects are all available for a small fee, and he uses a familiar trick to encourage the unwilling to come forward by insisting that those guilty of sin, especially unfaithful wives, must stay in their places and not offer him money. As a result, he expects, no one will dare to hold back. He boasts that this relic-business brings him a hundred marks a year in private income.
Then turning to his preaching, he begins by stressing that his only goal is to get people's money; he expresses total indifference to the fate of their souls in a mocking reference to eternal damnation as “goon a blackeberyed”. The only other reason he has for preaching is hatred: to attack and defame someone who has dared insult pardoners.
The strongest irony comes in lines 427-31 when he explains that avarice is his own vice and at the same time (line 425 “therefore”) the vice he preaches against with such powerful effect that he brings people to repent of their avarice sincerely, but he notes with proudness that this does not apply to himself. His only concern is that, realising their sinfulness, they give him money to benefit from his pardons and/or relics. 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; yow I kan telle” a moral tale.
As the sermon 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. Firstly, he uses strong evocations of the ugliness associated with each of the sins, provoking physical disgust; also using exclamations (apostrophe) to denounce the sins. Secondly, he lards his sermon with biblical and classical references, giving examples of the sin and its punishment or quotations attacking it.
The Pardoner, through Chaucer’s depiction has no thoughts or feelings (except for the anger aroused by the Host's violent speech, which makes him speechless), no hopes or regrets. He never talks about his motives, except to reiterate drearily that his purpose is ever one. There is no mention of thought or feeling. but only descriptions of action. Chaucer intends to create a character not like the Wife of Bath, but one without soul, feeling, or inner being; a creature of “naked will, unaware of its existence but in the act of will” as Derek Pearsall so validly contends.
There is one flicker of awareness of a world which is not an extension of the Pardoner's
will.
“Yet kan I maken oother folk to twynne
From avarice, and soore to repente.” (430-31)
This gives him a momentary unease, but he does not seem to understand why it should do so, and it fades. It is ironic therefore, that the Pardoner, in seeking primarily to gain acceptance and belief in his words and his relics and secondly to make money does actually do God’s work indirectly. He enforces the moral lesson inadvertently by the very example of his own shamelessness.
The story develops far beyond the strict demands of its sermon-frame, as can be seen from the entire opening section, in which the rioters 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 and depth to the exemplum that then follows its familiar course to the disaster. The story is an exemplum illustrating not so much the "Radix Malorum Est Cupiditas" as that of the wages of sin being death.
The Pardoner continues his memorised 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').
Chaucer’s use of couplets for effect is again an intelligent and useful device to highlight Chaucer’s judgement of the Pardoner. For example, the neatly rhyming “otes/grotes”, and “mitayn/grain” lend themselves to the balanced statement linking the good harvest of oats with the giving of money to the Pardoner himself. Furthermore, the same neat rhyme is used to contrasting effect in “famine/vine”. These terms are also spiritually charged in terms of the grain and wine from their communion connotations and those of sowing God’s word, which so ironically the Pardoner should be doing as well as underlining his lack of moral values.
Another device used so dextrously by Chaucer to emphasise the Pardoner’s character is rhetoric. There are three traditional genres of rhetoric, tied to three formal oratorical occasions (or to three types of audience): the judicial genre is the oratory of the law court, "the art of accusing and defending"; the deliberative genre is the oratory of parliamentary and popular politics; and the demonstrative genre is the oratory of ceremonial occasions. Texts instructing clergy in the arts of preaching were familiar in England during the fourteenth and previous century. Underpinning homiletics was the belief that the preacher is God’s mouthpiece, his aim moral improvement and that his approach should follow a clear if complex rhetorical structure (all of which the Pardoner seems to disregard), utilising a theme, protheme, dilatation, exemplum and peroration as described by Cicero. When Chaucer inverts Augustinian rhetoric, he emphasises the Pardoner's depravity and turns the time-honoured homiletic order upside down. In the Pardoner's Prologue and Tale Chaucer inverts Augustine's insistence that the preacher must pray before he delivers a sermon, Augustine's prescription to the homilist on his actio or his voice and gestures, and Augustine's emphasis that the homilist must charitably teach right and correct wrong by providing Christian instruction to his faithful congregation, where the Pardoner is in fact, guilty of the opposite. The words of the Pardoner give the reader a strong sense of the speaking voice through aims, methods and attitudes. The story told is, he claims, spiritually sound but the irony is shown of his attitude to what he preaches and his frank exploitation of his position. The story ministers to the very vice it condemns. The Pardoner is a prime example of one who refuses to listen, whose folly and disbelief 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.” The consequences of his actions upon himself or others are not considered.
Whilst the Pardoner’s Tale is within one or more stories within itself, of its time it does reflect some wonderful authorial qualities. Chaucer draws upon the classical debate about whether a deed can be termed a 'good action' if it is done for bad reasons, with evil intentions. It is a question which time has not answered and thus provides us with an excellent story today, and more so if taken in the Medieval context. Chaucer’s intelligent style and use of imagery, rhetoric and are all evident within the Prologues, yet this comment is loaded with irony, another device that Chaucer uses often in the Prologues and tales. The irony presents the fact that while he himself is “a full vicious man”; he can still tell a moral tale. It also underlines the fact that while some people do see the difference between right and wrong, they often still make the conscious decision to behave in accordance with the latter, but shows us the apparent gulf between what the Pardoner appears to be compared with the seeming perception of himself. The story, in drawing on such moral issues that are accessible to so many and with so many morals and meanings of its own – at the same time having so accurate an account provides us with historical information and depth – shows this ‘short story’ of Chaucer’s to indeed be One of the best short stories in English.