How Greed Is See In The Pardoners Tale - English Dual Credit - Essay

Proctor,
Elizabeth Proctor
English Dual Credit
Mr.McNichol
December 4, 2018
Final Essays
In Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Pardoner’s Tale, the pardoner is a character whose job is a combination of itinerant preaching, selling promises of salvation and religious relics. He tells readers that he preaches solely to get money from people and not to correct sin. In his sermon he often preaches about the sin of greed, the very vice that he struggles with himself. In one of his story’s he describes three rioters who spend their time drinking, they are told that an old friend was killed by death. In their drunken rage they decide to go out and slain death himself. They stumble across and old man and ask where death can be found, he points them to a grove where death is supposed to be. Instead of finding death they find gold coins with no owner in sight, so they decide they will split the coins amongst themselves. When the youngest of the three rioters goes into town the fetch bread and wine to celebrate, the other two rioters decide that they will kill him to keep more coins for themselves. When the youngest came back from the town, they jumped out and stabbed him to death. Little did the surviving two know, the youngest rioter had poisoned the wine, so when they celebrated, they too were killed leaving the coins to no one.
In this story the power of greed took over the rioters and tested how easily they turned on each other. Their trust and moral fiber was not strong enough to avoid the temptation of greed for the coins, they completely ignored their friendships for wealth. In this day and age it is seemingly more common for people to ignore what is right and instead turn to the vices, such as greed, for more power and wealth. We ditch our strength and ability to do what we think and know is right in a difficult situation to do something that is sometimes what we think is easier, which is often leads us toward vices and sin.
I feel like this is a common thing in high school especially in today's age, greed can prove to be a test of our moral fiber in many situations. An example of this could be students who take food out of the cafeteria without paying because, they just “do...