1. How can irony be an effective tool to both teach and manipulate?
“The Pardoner’s Tale”
How can irony be an effective tool to both teach and manipulate?

2. Some Background…
Pardoners sold pardons—official documents from Rome that pardoned a person’s sins.
The Pardoner in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales is dishonest.
The Pardoner often preaches about how money is the root of all evil.
Beginning course details and/or books/materials needed for a class/project.

3. Death personified
The Pardoner’s Tale is a reminder that death is inevitable.
Death is personified as a thief who pierces the heart of his victims.
The tale refers to death as the person responsible for slaughtering one thousand by his hand during the plague (line 670).
The three men from the bar are determined to challenge death because he has taken away their friends.
This was an iconographic image of death throughout the middle ages and later.
(image taken from )

4. Hypothesize…
How did Chaucer feel about the role of the Pardoner in society/ the church?

5. Chaucer’s dissatisfaction
There was widespread dissatisfaction with pardoners (as also with money-loving Friars) in Chaucer's time, and both were popular subjects of satire and joking.
“The Pardoner’s Tale” is an allegorical, satirical, and ironic conveyance of the greed of the church and the recognition that the church was corrupted during this time period.

6. A symbolic representation.
ALLEGORY
The Seven Deadly Sins
Pride
Avarice
Lust
Anger
Gluttony
Envy
Sloth
A symbolic representation.
In “The Pardoner’s Tale” we are exposed to the symbolic representation of the vices of humanity- The Seven Deadly Sins

7. Allegory a narrative with both a literal and symbolic meaning.
Exemplum: an allegory that uses an example to make a point.

8. IRONY (write these if you don’t know them!!)
Situational
The opposite of what is expected to happen occurs
Verbal
The opposite of what is meant is said (sarcasm)
Dramatic
The reader knows something the character does not

9. Situational Irony
The fire safety lectures were canceled because the screen caught on fire.
An ambulance runs over a pedestrian.
If you have a phobia of long words you have to tell people that you have Hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia...

10. Why is this ironic?

12. Accidentally Ironic

14. Extra Examples
Your friend walks into a pile of dog poop and you say “Wow, how lucky are you?”
*This is where sarcasm is shown for verbal irony.

15. You work from six in the morning to six at night doing manual labor.
Verbal irony would be if you came home and said “I just had the most amazing day!”
A mean sales women is rude to you.
You would turn to whoever you are with and say “What a lovely lady she is.”

16. Dramatic Irony
Scary music in a horror movie only the audience can hear, so we are prepared for what is to come while the characters are not.
In Titanic, we know the boat is going to sink. The people on the boat are unaware of the actual dangers the iceberg presents.
Have you seen, read, or know the story of Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet?