A big message in the Canterbury Tales is that the church is corrupt. Chaucer uses hyperbole and stereotypes to show that most of the members of the Church, mainly clergy, are extremely greedy especially the higher up in power they …show more content…
The Pardoner’s tale satirizes the corruption of the church, showing more of the members of the church were influenced by greed than by God. The Pardoner Tale ironically is about the dangers of greed. In it three men search for death and end up finding a bag of gold completely forgetting about their task to find death, one man goes off to go buy wine and foods and decides to poison the wine so he can have all the money to himself. The other two plot to kill the man who left to buy the wine so they could have more money for themselves, in end everyone dies and meets death. In the story Chaucer uses reversal because no one keeps the treasure in the end and they all die and also using exaggeration with the men’s quest to kill death, but death is already dead. Also the entire premise of the tale is a parody revolving around death. The story is ironic and serves a contradiction to the Pardoner considering how the Pardoner talks about his greed and admits to selling people fake religious relics, ignoring his own teachings which condemn greed. The Pardoner is made out to be a hypocrite, who finds nothing wrong in taking people’s money under false pretenses. Some could say the Pardoner represented a part of the Church since the Church taught against greed but had no problem in taking people