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Essay / Miller's Tale by Geoffrey Chaucer: fiction invented to please must remain close to reality
According to Horace, “fiction invented to please must remain close to reality. » This article will discuss this proponent of literary theory based on The Miller's Tale by Geoffrey Chaucer. This story is the second tale among Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. A Miller tells us the story of a rich carpenter, John, his young wife Alison, and the two tenants, Nicholas and Absolon. The story dwells on Alison's deception and infidelity towards her husband John. They both live in Oxford. The tragedy begins when John brings in Nicholas and Absolon, two poor scholars who need a home. Nicholas, along with Absolon, develops a lustful interest in Alison and begins a plan to seduce her into bed. Indeed, Alison gives in to Nicholas and they go to bed for a short while while the husband has gone on a day trip. Additionally, Nicholas and Alison hatch a plan to spend an entire night together in the husband's bed using the biblical allusion to Noah's flood. Nicholas quickly confuses John by telling him that God will once again destroy the earth with the flood so that they can make "arks" to survive the flood. Simultaneously, Absolon, on the other hand, uses love songs to convince Alison to go to bed. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay This poem reveals the conflict caused by age contrast within couples. In this way, it directly accords with Horace's belief that literature invented for pleasure must remain close to reality, as the poem reflects the challenges that arise when one marries a woman much younger than oneself. First, Horace's statement simply means that literature should portray the reality of life as it provides pleasure to readers. Literature reflects life as it is. For Horace, this is the main objective of artistic conception. It defines and mixes the purposes of entertainment with reality so that we can see our characters and our morality or our character and our vices when we read any work. Regarding, then, this means that we should be able to learn a moral lesson from fiction by relating the events, themes, and characters in the work of fiction to those we see in real life. Only in this way can we find applicable literature or fiction to offer us a moral lesson. Chaucer uses The Miller's Tale not only to provide humor, but he also foregrounds the moral lesson of the story by including the tragedy due to John. because of his gullibility, he falls from the ceiling and gets injured. It's not about inspiring empathy in the reader. It acts as a warning to those who are gullible that the consequences of their gullibility are intended to bring them harm and deception. The humorous parts of the poem are indeed fictional, but the poet fits within the framework of Horace's theory, so he only uses humor to please the audience when he sees reality in this work. Humor also serves to capture the audience's attention because it creates a significant magnetic field to lead them to choose a moral lesson richly contained in the story. From the prologue of the story, we see the Miller resume the narration of the tale. . However, the poet detaches his character from that of the Miller and apologizes by indicating that he is only telling the story as it was first told by the Miller. “I think I'll repeat it here. And that's whyI could chase away all the good guys, for the love of the Goddess, I think I don't see a perfect understanding, but I have to respond to it. Already we see two narrators of this story, Miller and Chaucer. The Miller is a fictional narrator whose voice and authority Chaucer, the poet, uses to tell the story. Essentially, this describes the reality of folk storytelling where one tells the story as it was told by another. The poet uses this technique to conform to the theory that fiction must be real. It uses narrative techniques employed by ancient folk tales to tell a story of its own creation. In fact, other viewers and interpreters can see and understand Chaucer as the Miller does. This is all the more reason why he apologizes to convince the reader that he is only borrowing the story from the owner and therefore he is just a spokesperson telling the story. Additionally, the poet uses fictionally flawed characters to depict the reality of life. The flaws of these characters are a typical reality of human beings beyond borders. For example, the infidelity described by Alison is a typical behavior common to both women and men during this era. The poet used satire to mock the reality of life itself. In other words, the satirical nature of the story is meant to offer humor on the surface, but it is deeply calculated to condemn the vices portrayed by most people in the real world. Furthermore, Miller's character is a pure reality of the chauvinism and patriarchy of the society of the time of the poem depicted. Chaucer reveals to us that Miller was a cruel and jealous man. He frequently isolates his wife in a cage or room so that she does not have the freedom to mingle with other people, as illustrated by this sentence: "He was jealous and he was in a cage." Miller's portrayal also indicates a lack of wisdom in him. “He knew Nat Catoun, because his mind was crude.” Therefore, Chaucer draws a similarity between Miller's character and that of John. Both characters are not intelligent, a trait that causes John to submit to the deceptions of his wife and Nicholas. Although the characters here are fictional, the reality of life presents us with such characters in society. In fact, the poet wants readers and audiences to cross-examine themselves and the people around them to determine whether follies such as those depicted in the characters of Nicholas, John, Alison, and Miller exist among them. He further invites the public to study the consequences of the follies of fiction in order to rectify their own, lest they suffer the same consequences. It is also worth considering the vulgarism of the language used in the poem. In the prologue, the poet makes us understand that he is not the true teller of the tale. Its artistic and stylistic nature to write in the disguise of Miller, the drunkard, is not questionable; nevertheless, this gives him the freedom to call a spade, a spade, as he tells the story using vulgar language as his chosen diction. The poet uses this technique to represent two realities of life. The first is the fact that it is common for drunk people to be careless and lack manners in their language when chatting. The second reality is that, more often than not, drunk people never paint a false picture of a situation, because they do not know the disguise but the reality. The vulgar language of the poem therefore acts as a vivid description to bring the audience to the real situation without camouflage. For example, the poet, through the present narrator, Miller,.