SOURCE: "Fiction and Game in The Canterbury Tales," in The Critical Quarterly, Vol. 7, No. 2, Summer, 1965, pp. 185-97.

In the following excerpt, Josipovici explains the function of the game motif as a method of resolving immoral aspects of the "Miller's Tale" and "The Pardoner's Prologue and Tale," and as a method of ironic self-revelation that reveals the folly of the pilgrims.

Wherever we turn in The Canterbury Tales [quotations are taken from The Poetical Works of Chaucer, ed. by F. N. Robinson (1933)] we are faced with a conflict between the moral and the immoral, the edifying and the unedifying, the religious and the secular. This conflict is first suggested by the narrator in the "General Prologue"; it provides the theme of a number of the headlinks; it forms the substance of the Pardoner's Prologue and Epilogue, and dominates the Parson's Prologue; and the work concludes with the Retractation, which...