What Is The Resolution Of The Pardoner's Tale

The Ironic Resolution of The Pardoner’s Tale: Greed’s Self-Destructive Victory

The resolution of The Pardoner’s Tale is not a simple conclusion but a masterstroke of layered irony that binds the story’s plot, its moral, and the character of its teller into a single, devastating critique. It is the moment where the explicit warning against radix malorum (the root of all evils, greed) is violently enacted by the very characters who embody it, while the tale’s narrator, a hypocrite who preaches against the sin he practices, achieves a hollow, pyrrhic victory. Understanding this resolution requires moving beyond the three rioters’ deaths to see how Chaucer uses their fates to underscore a universal truth: the pursuit of ill-gotten gain inevitably consumes the seeker, and the most profound moral lessons are often delivered by the most compromised messengers.

Plot Recap: The Path to the Inevitable End

The tale’s resolution is the direct consequence of its plot. Think about it: three young, debauched Flemish men in a tavern learn that a friend has been killed by a thief named Death. Swearing vengeance, they set out to kill this Death. Instead, they find an old man who points them to a tree where they discover a large stash of gold coins. Their immediate vow to “live in luxury” and “be merry” upon finding the treasure instantly replaces their murderous intent, revealing that their true god is wealth.

1. The Poison Plot: To secure the gold for themselves, the youngest rioter goes to town to buy wine and bread. He secretly purchases rat poison, planning to kill his two companions and claim all the gold alone.
2. The Murder Plot: The two older men, waiting in the forest, plot to kill the youth upon his return so they can split the treasure between just the two of them.
3. The Double Execution: The youth returns, drinks the poisoned wine, and dies. The two older men then stab him to death, as planned. They drink the remaining poisoned wine, celebrating their “victory,” and die in agony.
4. The Final Irony: The old man, who may be a symbolic figure of mortality or even a devilish tempter, is left alone with the bodies and the gold, having witnessed the complete self-annihilation of the three men.

The plot’s resolution is a perfect, closed circle of treachery and death. So every action is motivated by greed, and every action leads directly to the characters’ demise. There are no loose ends; the gold is the catalyst and the only silent witness to the carnage.

Thematic Resolution: The Triumph of the Moral, Despite the Messenger

The tale’s stated moral is clear: “Radix malorum est cupiditas” (Greed is the root of all evils). The resolution proves this axiom with brutal, literal finality. In real terms, the three men do not die at the hands of an external “Death” they sought; they are destroyed by the very sin they embraced. Their greed corrupts their loyalty, turning them on each other. The gold does not bring life; it becomes the instrument of their murder. The poison and the dagger are merely tools; the true killer is the cupiditas that makes using them seem rational.

This thematic resolution is absolute and unambiguous. Still, chaucer, through the Pardoner, delivers a moral that is structurally sound within the narrative. The rioters’ journey from seeking vengeance to seeking treasure to killing each other is a parabolic descent. Now, their resolution—dead in the forest, gold beside them—is the visual and narrative proof of the moral. It is a cautionary tale in its purest form: this is what happens when you let greed rule your soul.

The Deeper Resolution: The Unresolved Hypocrisy of the Pardoner

The true, complex resolution of the tale, however, lies not in the forest but in the Host’s reaction and the Pardoner’s own position. The Pardoner is furious, revealing his true character: he is not a reformed sinner but a man whose professional identity is threatened. After the tale, the Host, Harry Bailly, is so moved by its moral that he offers a curse on the Pardoner’s relics and offers to kiss them himself to “heal” the Pardoner of his own obvious hypocrisy. He demands the Host “kiss the relics” and pay for the indulgence he sells, exposing that his preaching is a performance for profit.

Here lies the tale’s most profound and unsettling resolution: the moral lesson is perfectly delivered by a man who is its living refutation. The story’s resolution about the destructive nature of greed is complete and powerful, but the narrative frame’s resolution is one of bitter, comic irony. The Pardoner has just told a flawless parable against avarice, and in doing so, he has:

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• Demonstrated his own skill as a storyteller, proving he can manipulate an audience (us and the other pilgrims) effectively.
• Revealed his utter lack of self-awareness or repentance. He is angry that his hypocrisy was noted, not convicted by his own tale.
• Secured, through the tale’s popularity, a form of victory. The Host is momentarily silenced by the moral force of the story, even if he mocks its teller. The Pardoner’s goal is to move people to buy his pardons; he has moved them deeply with a story. The means are different, but the manipulation is the same.

Thus, the resolution is twofold:

1. Internal/Narrative Resolution: The rioters’ story ends with their justified, self-inflicted destruction. The moral is proven.
2. He has “won” the storytelling contest (arguably) but lost all moral authority. On the flip side, External/Frame Resolution: The Pardoner’s story ends with his hypocrisy laid bare but unaltered. The audience (the pilgrims and us) is left with a powerful lesson and a deeply flawed teacher.

Literary Devices Cementing the Resolution

Chaucer’s craftsmanship ensures the resolution feels inevitable and thematically rich.

• Dramatic Irony: The audience understands the poison and the stabbing plot long before the characters do. We watch the men march to their doom, each confident in his secret plan. This irony makes their deaths feel like a tragic, logical necessity rather than mere surprise.
• Symbolism: The gold is the central symbol. It is not just treasure; it is the tangible embodiment of cupiditas. It replaces the quest for “Death” with a quest for “Life,” but it delivers only death. The old man’

The old man’s symbolism extends further: he embodies the inescapable reality that the rioters foolishly deny. His weary plea to exchange his age for youth—ignored by the youths fixated on gold—highlights their tragic misplacement of value. He is not merely a plot device but a living memento mori, his very presence a silent sermon on mortality that the rioters, blinded by cupiditas, utterly fail to heed. Consider this: chaucer layers this with foreshadowing in the rioters’ sworn oath to "live and die each of them for the other," a vow shattered within minutes as they plot mutual murder over the gold. Their language itself betrays them; they call the gold "fair florins" and "precious jewels," terms usually reserved for sacred or heavenly things, revealing how completely they have idolized wealth. Even so, even the Pardoner’s own verbal irony—his blunt admission that he preaches "nothing but for covetise"—serves as a meta-commentary on the tale’s mechanism: he uses the very vice he condemns as his tool, making the story’s moral more potent precisely because it emerges from such a corrupt source. The Host’s initial offer to kiss the relics, framed as a mocking cure for hypocrisy, ironically becomes the truest moment of spiritual insight in the frame: he intuitively grasps that the Pardoner’s sickness requires not money, but a confrontation with the poison he peddles—a confrontation the Pardoner steadfastly avoids by doubling down on his sales pitch.

This layered craftsmanship ensures the resolution transcends simple satire. We, like the pilgrims, are moved by the narrative’s moral force, yet we are simultaneously implicated in the Pardoner’s game—we have listened, we have felt the lesson’s weight, and we now face the same choice: do we internalize the warning against greed, or do we, like the Pardoner, mistake the performance for the substance? Thus, Chaucer leaves us not with a comforting moral fable, but with an unsettling, enduring challenge—to discern truth wherever it appears, even when it comes wrapped in the most blatant falsehood, and to guard against the very vice we condemn in others while excusing it in ourselves. Practically speaking, the Pardoner "wins" the contest only in the narrowest, most hollow sense—he secures attention, perhaps even coin—but the true victory belongs to the story itself. That said, its moral authority remains unassailable because it is delivered by a man who embodies its antithesis; the lesson gains strength from being proven true even in the telling’s corruption. Which means the tale’s power lies in its refusal to let the audience off the hook. The rioters’ deaths are not just a plot point but a mirror held up to every listener: greed consumes the greedy, no matter how eloquently they deny it while counting their profits. The tale’s final, resonant truth is that the most dangerous hypocrisy is not preaching what one does not practice, but failing to recognize that the sermon applies to you, especially when you are the one preaching.