Title: The Merchant’s Tale: Chaucerian Poetic Artistry and Its Effects on Readership
Abstract: Chaucer’s storytelling techniques, which Chaucer exploits in the basic pattern of the popular tale for certain effects, accompany his audience as a co-author in understanding a tale. chaucer’s storytelling style in its convolution and its multiplicity of voice contrasts with that of a popular storyteller. In the Chaucerian narrative, meaning, or Chaucer’s complex view-point, is wrapped and diffusely proliferated with an ostensible story. Thus, the true meaning of a Chaucerian tale is not found by simply following an omniscient narrator’s guideline, but, rather, is discovered through the audience’s subjective and critical negotiations of the tale. In case of a popular narrative, the audience is drawn into a narrator’s storytelling without doubt and does not even realize the distance between the reality and the world in the story. Contrarily, a narrator’s continual intrusions in the Chaucerian narrative awaken the reader from a fictional world and prevent him from being naively immersed in a narrative. The narrator’s interruptions in the course of his tale-telling enable the audience to view the tale not as an absolute entity with a direct meaning or interpretation, but as a polysemous narrative which invites us to view it in several ways. Chaucer’s effort not only to impose the “unreliability” or the “indeterminacy” on his narrator’s voice, but to preserve the multiplicity of voices with no merging or resolution among them is observed throughout the Merchant’s narrative as well.
Publication Year: 2014
Publication Date: 2014-05-01
Language: en
Type: article
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