The Canterbury Tales: The Pardoner's Tale Themes

For reasons no one has ever been quite able to decipher, the Pardoner responds to the Host's request for a tale with a detailed exposé of the techniques he uses to sell his fake relics and expensi...

The Pardoner is the epitome of hypocrisy. We don't get a better definition of a hypocrite than his characterization of himself as "preaching against what I practice." The Pardoner attacks greed in...

To expand on the theme "greed is the root of all evil," the Pardoner preaches a fable about three drunk young degenerates who set out to kill Death and end up meeting their own demise as a result o...

The Pardoner demonstrates his theme that "greed is the root of all evil" not only in his tale, but also in his "confession" of the methods he uses to make money. His greed leads him to preach a ser...

The theme of body parts is found in abundance in the Pardoner's Tale, from the bone fragments the Pardoner sells to make a profit, to the explicit descriptions of body parts involved in gluttony, t...

The message about sin that emerges from the Pardoner's Prologue and Tale is how interconnected it is—sin leads only to more sin. The Pardoner's gluttony and lechery, for example, lead to his gree...

The Pardoner's method for selling pardons and relics is to preach an entertaining sermon/story to inspire repentance in his audience. He's a master storyteller. In the General Prologue, the narrato...