Misplaced Pages

#858141

39-582: The frame story of the poem, as set out in the 858 lines of Middle English which make up the General Prologue, is of a religious pilgrimage. The narrator, Geoffrey Chaucer, is in The Tabard Inn in Southwark , where he meets a group of 'sundry folk' who are all on the way to Canterbury, the site of the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket , a martyr reputed to have the power of healing the sinful. The setting

78-528: A franklin ; a haberdasher; a carpenter; a weaver; a dyer; a tapestry weaver; a cook ; a shipman ; a doctor of physic ; a wife of Bath ; a parson and his brother, a plowman; a miller ; a manciple ; a reeve ; a summoner ; a pardoner ; the Host (a man called Harry Bailey); and Chaucer himself. At the end of this section, the Host proposes that the group ride together and entertain one another with stories. He lays out his plan: each pilgrim will tell two stories on

117-743: A defining emotion and tone that sets the context for the main story. Chief Baron of the Exchequer The Chief Baron of the Exchequer was the first "baron" (meaning judge ) of the English Exchequer of Pleas . "In the absence of both the Treasurer of the Exchequer or First Lord of the Treasury , and the Chancellor of the Exchequer , it was he who presided in the equity court and answered

156-472: A first story into one or more other stories within it. The frame story may also be used to inform readers about aspects of the secondary narrative(s) that may otherwise be hard to understand. This should not be confused with narrative structure . A notable example is the 1001 Nights or The Decameron . Some of the earliest frame stories are from ancient Egypt, including one in the Papyrus Westcar ,

195-464: A great part of the poem, the events after and before the interpolated recollection are of greater interest than the memory. A film that plays with frame narrative is the 1994 Forrest Gump . Most of it is narrated by Forrest to various companions on the bus-stop bench. However, in the last fifth or so of the film, Forrest gets up and leaves the bench, and we follow him as he meets with Jenny and her son. This final segment suddenly has no narrator unlike

234-427: A new light. A framing device might simply be a defining image of the narrative or art that is used at the beginning and end of the work, as in the film Chariots of Fire which begins and ends with the characters running along a beach, accompanied at both times by the movie's famous theme music. This scene, although chronologically in the middle of the film and unimportant to the straightforward plot, serves to convey

273-441: A pastiche of the historical Harry Bailey's surviving 1381 poll-tax account of Southwark's inhabitants. The following are the first 18 lines of the General Prologue. The text was written in a dialect associated with London and spellings associated with the then-emergent Chancery Standard. In modern prose: When April with its sweet showers has pierced March's drought to the root, bathing every vein in such liquid by whose virtue

312-464: A story arc called Worlds End which consisted of frame stories, and sometimes even featured stories within stories within stories. Sometimes, as in Washington Irving 's Sketch Book , which contains " The Legend of Sleepy Hollow " and " Rip Van Winkle " among others, the conceit is that the author of the book is not the real author but a fictional character, in this case a man named Crayon. Here

351-510: A story within the main narrative encapsulates some aspect of the framing story, in which case it is called a mise en abyme . A typical frame story is One Thousand and One Nights , in which the character Scheherazade narrates a set of fairy tales to the Sultan Shahriyar over many nights. Many of Shahrazad's tales are also frame stories, such as Tale of Sindbad the Seaman and Sindbad

390-404: A young priest, because the movie is based more on stories Salieri told about Mozart than on historical fact. Another use is a form of procatalepsis , where the writer puts the readers' possible reactions to the story in the characters listening to it. In The Princess Bride the frame of a grandfather reading the story to his reluctant grandson puts the cynical reaction a viewer might have to

429-453: Is April, and the prologue starts by singing the praises of that month whose rains and warm western wind restore life and fertility to the earth and its inhabitants. This abundance of life, the narrator says, prompts people to go on pilgrimages; in England, the goal of such pilgrimages is the shrine of Thomas Becket. The narrator falls in with a group of pilgrims, and the largest part of the prologue

SECTION 10

#1732844076859

468-413: Is framed by the narrator's story and letters. Mary Shelley 's novel Frankenstein has multiple framed narratives. In the book, Robert Walton writes letters to his sister, describing the story told to him by the scientist Victor Frankenstein . Midway through Frankenstein's story, he is met by the monster , who tells him his own story after he was created, and this third narrative even briefly contains

507-407: Is taken up by a description of them; Chaucer seeks to describe their 'condition', their 'array', and their social 'degree'. The narrator expresses admiration and praise towards the pilgrims' abilities. The pilgrims include a knight ; his son, a squire ; the knight's yeoman ; a prioress , accompanied by a nun and the nun's priest ; a monk ; a friar ; a merchant ; a clerk ; a sergeant of law ;

546-511: The One Thousand and One Nights ( Arabian Nights ), The Decameron , and the Canterbury Tales , in which each pilgrim tells his own kind of tale, and whose frame story "was once the most admired part of Chaucer's work". The use of a frame story in which a single narrative is set in the context of the telling of a story is also a technique with a long history, dating back at least to

585-604: The Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor , and The Eloquent Peasant . Other early examples are from Indian literature , including the Sanskrit epics Mahabharata , Ramayana , Panchatantra , Syntipas 's The Seven Wise Masters , and the fable collections Hitopadesha and Vikram and The Vampire . This form gradually spread west through the centuries and became popular, giving rise to such classic frame tale collections as

624-451: The holy blessed martyr , who helped them when they were ill. Frame story A frame story (also known as a frame tale , frame narrative , sandwich narrative , or intercalation ) is a literary technique that serves as a companion piece to a story within a story , where an introductory or main narrative sets the stage either for a more emphasized second narrative or for a set of shorter stories. The frame story leads readers from

663-457: The Christian allegory Pilgrim's Progress and its sequel, explaining that they were dreams he had while he was in prison and felt God wanted him to write down. This worked because it made what might have been seen as a fantasy more like a divine revelation to others who believed as he did. In modern usage, it is sometimes used in works of fantasy as a means toward suspension of disbelief about

702-487: The General Prologue is also intimately linked with the narrative style of the tales. As the narrative voice has been under critical scrutiny for some time, so too has the identity of the narrator himself. Though fierce debate has taken place on both sides, (mostly contesting that the narrator either is, or is not, Geoffrey Chaucer), most contemporary scholars believe that the narrator is meant to be Chaucer himself to some degree. Some scholars, like William W. Lawrence, claim that

741-566: The Landsman , a collection of adventures related by Sindbad the Seaman to Sindbad the Landsman. Ovid 's Metamorphoses makes extensive use of framing, with the stories nested several deep, allowing the inclusion of many different tales in one work. Emily Brontë 's Wuthering Heights uses this literary device to tell the story of Heathcliff and Catherine, along with the subplots. Her sister Anne uses this device in her epistolary novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall . The main heroine's diary

780-458: The Middle Ages, whereas Latin was the language of learning. The opening lines of The Canterbury Tales show a diversity of phrasing by including words of French origin like "droghte," "veyne," and "licour" alongside English terms for nature: "roote," "holt and heeth," and "croppes." John Matthews Manly attempted to identify pilgrims with real fourteenth-century people. In some instances, such as

819-550: The Summoner and the Friar, he attempts localization to a small geographic area. The Man of Law is identified as Thomas Pynchbek (also Pynchbeck), who was chief baron of the exchequer . Sir John Bussy , an associate of Pynchbek, is identified as the Franklin. The Pembroke estates near Baldeswelle supplied the portrait for the unnamed Reeve. Sebastian Sobecki argues that the General Prologue is

SECTION 20

#1732844076859

858-417: The bar i.e. spoke for the court." Practically speaking, he held the most important office of the Exchequer of Pleas. The chief baron, along with the three puisne barons, sat as a court of common law , heard suits in the court of equity and settled revenue disputes. A puisne baron was styled "Mr Baron X" and the chief baron as "Lord Chief Baron X". From 1550 to 1579, there was a major distinction between

897-408: The beginning and end of the work, or returns periodically. A framing device may take the form of a recurrent element at the beginning and end of the narrative. For example, a story may begin with a character visiting a park under one set of circumstances, then returning at the end to the same park under a different set of circumstances, having undergone a change that allows him or her to see the park in

936-414: The beginning section of Homer 's Odyssey , in which the narrator Odysseus tells of his wandering in the court of King Alcinous . A frame story is a literary device that acts as a convenient conceit to organize a set of smaller narratives, either devised by the author or taken from a previous stock of popular tales, slightly altered by the author for the purpose of the longer narrative. Sometimes

975-435: The chief baron and the second, third and fourth puisne barons. The difference was in social status and education . All of the chief barons had been trained as lawyers in the inns of court . With the exception of Henry Bradshaw and Sir Clement Higham , both barristers -at-law, all of the chief barons who served Queen Elizabeth I , had attained the highest and most prestigious rank of a lawyer, serjeant-at-law . In 1875,

1014-479: The flower is engendered, and when Zephyrus with his sweet breath has also enlivened the tender plants in every wood and field, and the young sun is halfway through Aries , and small birds that sleep all night with an open eye make melodies (their hearts so goaded by Nature), then people long to go on pilgrimages, and palmers seek faraway shores and distant saints known in sundry lands, and especially they wend their way to Canterbury from every shire of England to seek

1053-465: The frame for the Tales as a whole (or of the intended whole) and introduces the characters/storytellers. These are introduced in the order of their rank in accordance with the three medieval social estates (clergy, nobility, and commoners and peasantry). These characters are also representative of their estates and models with which the others in the same estate can be compared and contrasted. The structure of

1092-436: The frame includes the world of the imagined Crayon, his stories, and the reader who is assumed to play along and "know" who Crayon is. When there is a single story, the frame story is used for other purposes – chiefly to position the reader's attitude toward the tale. This can be done in a variety of ways. A common reason to frame a single story is to draw attention to the narrator's unreliability . By explicitly making

1131-555: The marvels depicted in the story. J.R.R. Tolkien , in his essay " On Fairy-Stories " complained of such devices as unwillingness to treat the genre seriously; he used frame stories of different kinds in his Middle-earth writings. Lewis Carroll 's Alice stories ( Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass ) includes such a frame, the stories themselves using dream-like logic and sequences. Still, even as

1170-434: The narrator a character within the frame story, the writer distances him or herself from the narrator. The writer may characterize the narrator to cast doubt on the narrator's truthfulness, as when in P. G. Wodehouse 's stories of Mr. Mulliner , Mulliner is made a fly fisherman , a person who is expected to tell tales of unbelievably large fish. The movie Amadeus is framed as a story that an old Antonio Salieri tells to

1209-485: The narrator is Geoffrey Chaucer in person. Others, like Marchette Chute for instance, contest that the narrator is instead a literary creation like the other pilgrims in the tales. Chaucer makes use of his extensive literary and linguistic knowledge in the General Prologue by interplaying Latin, French, and English words against each other. French was considered a hierarchal, courtly, and aristocratic language during

General Prologue - Misplaced Pages Continue

1248-407: The reader's wondering whether the story is worth reading to the listeners'. Such an approach was used, too, by Edith Wharton in her novella Ethan Frome , in which a nameless narrator hears from many characters in the town of Starkfield about the main character Ethan's story. A specialized form of the frame is a dream vision , where the narrator claims to have gone to sleep, dreamed the events of

1287-472: The rest of the film that came before it, but is instead told through Forrest and Jenny's dialogues. This approach is also demonstrated in the 2008 film Slumdog Millionaire (adapted from the 2005 novel Q & A ), about a poor street kid named Jamal who comes close to winning Kaun Banega Crorepati (the Indian equivalent of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? ) but finds himself accused of cheating. Most of

1326-433: The romantic fairytale into the story in the grandson's persona, and helps defuse it. This is the use when the frame tells a story that lacks a strong narrative hook in its opening; the narrator can engage the reader's interest by telling the story to answer the curiosity of his listeners, or by warning them that the story began in an ordinary seeming way, but they must follow it to understand later actions, thereby identifying

1365-406: The story is narrated at a police station by Jamal, who explains how he knew the answers to each of the questions as the show is played back on video. The show itself then serves as another framing device , as Jamal sees flashbacks of his past as each question is asked. The last portion of the film then unfolds without any narrator. In musical sonata form or rondo , a reprised theme occurs at

1404-551: The story proceeds realistically, the dream frame casts doubt on the events. In the book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz , the events really occur; the dream frame added for the movie detracts from the validity of the fantasy. To be a frame narrative, the story must act primarily as an occasion for the telling of other stories. For example, Odysseus narrates much of the Odyssey to the Phaeacians , but, even though this recollection forms

1443-503: The story, and then awoken to tell the tale. In medieval Europe, this was a common device, used to indicate that the events included are fictional; Geoffrey Chaucer used it in The Book of the Duchess , The House of Fame , Parlement of Foules , and The Legend of Good Women (the last also containing a multi-story frame story within the dream). Later, John Bunyan used a dream device in

1482-566: The tale of a family whom he had been observing. This set of frame narratives that fit together is sometimes called a Chinese box narrative; other instances of this style of narrative can be found in Plato 's Symposion , Jostein Gaarder 's The Solitaire Mystery , Emily Brontë 's Wuthering Heights , and Joseph Conrad 's Heart of Darkness . Frame stories have appeared in comic books . Neil Gaiman 's comic book series The Sandman featured

1521-492: The way to Canterbury and two on the way back. Whoever has told the most meaningful and comforting stories, with "the best sentence and moost solaas" (line 798) will receive a free meal paid for by the rest of the pilgrims upon their return. The company agrees and makes the Host its governor, judge, and record keeper. They set off the next morning and draw straws to determine who will tell the first tale. The Knight wins and prepares to tell his tale. The General Prologue establishes

#858141