Interpretations: The Pardoner's Tale

The Association of castration, blindeness, and death, so crucial in Freud, is already a given in Chaucer, just as the strangely authentic power of the Pardoner's sermon, which transcends his overt tricksterism, testifies to the weird prolepsis of Dostoevsky in the Canterbury Tales. A Professional hypocrite who yet can invoke the terror of eternity, truly despite himself, the Pardoners is the most powerful representation of depravity we can find in English before the creation of Shakespeare's lago and Edmund. New Book