Dieter Mehl, "Chaucer's Narrator: Troilus and Criseyde and the Canterbury Tales"

Mehl, Dieter. "Chaucer's narrator: Troilus and Criseyde and the Canterbury Tales." The Cambridge Chaucer Companion. Cambridge University Press, pp 213-225.

In his essay “Chaucer's narrator: Troilus and Criseyde and the Canterbury Tales”, Dieter Mehl examines Chaucer’s use of narrators throughout his various works, from the Book of the Duchess to the Canterbury Tales. Examining the kinds of unreliable narrators – that is, narrators who should not necessarily be identified with their author – that Chaucer employs and to what ends, he posits that “the point is not so much whether Chaucer really was that kind of man” but rather that such a narrator is a construct of the fiction and works to fulfill its aims. He introduces the idea of the narrator as a craftsman or guide, who both manipulates and attempts to instruct his audience in the workings of his manipulation in order to aid our understanding of the text. Mehl suggests that Chaucer’s narrators encourage dialogue, an active interaction between author, audience and text, by preventing any clear moral judgment from being drawn and by appealing to that of the reader instead. This experimentation with unreliable narration finds its ultimate form in the Canterbury Tales, where the myriad narrators, their sincerity and our judgments of them become as much the subject of the work as any other theme explored.

--Liz Soehngen (article distributed in class)