Summary And Critical Analysis Of Chaucer s The Miller s...

Summary and Critical Analysis of Chaucer’s â€Å"The Miller’s Tale† Geoffrey Chaucer starts â€Å"The Miller’s Tale† out with an intriguing prologue. In this prologue, the Miller is found to be drunk due to his behavior towards the Reeve, and his judgment towards â€Å"The Knight’s Tale.† The Reeve and Miller have never seen eye to eye; they never have and never will. With this being said, the Miller tells a tale of a gullible carpenter whose wife cheats on him with an intelligent lodger. Since the Reeve is a carpenter, he becomes very frustrated about this tale and begs the Host and Miller to not tell it. The Reeve is overruled and the tale goes on. The first character in â€Å"The Miller’s Tale† is John, the carpenter. John is a rich man who marries a young woman named Alison. John is also quite gullible, as the tale explains. Jealous of Alison’s youth and beauty, he becomes very protective over his wife. This rich carpenter allows a lodger, Nicholas, to stay in his home. John does not need to take N icholas’s money because John is a wealthy man. A carpenter and a Reeve both have the same occupation, so John symbolizes the Reeve, who is on the journey to Canterbury with the Miller. The Miller uses John to irritate the Reeve by telling humorous flaws about him. The lodger is a poor, young, intelligent man named Nicholas. Nicholas’s characteristics are shown in the lines below. A poor scholar was lodging with him there, Who’d learned the arts, but all his phantasy Was turned to the study