Chaucer’s Provisions for Future Contingencies

In Chaucer’s narratives, people think about the future, and typically they find it uncertain. Quelle surprise! you exclaim ironically, since narrative requires suspense in the steps between beginning and ending, or otherwise it would become the exposition of a static, allegorical, universal grid. The uncertain steps of narrative might only be those of characters within a story, whereas the omniscient narrator would know the plot and is beguiling the reader. For Chaucer, however, uncertainty extends to the narrator, and what is reached by the ending is only a hypothesis. There is also a choice of narrators. The beguilement of the reader in the suspense of a story becomes confrontation with something like a real problem of choosing from past to future. Where there is a real problem, there may be various trials of possible solutions. Each plan has steps taken in a distinctive pattern, and we learn distinct and ingenious ways of conceiving of what we may do in the course of time. Thus, among Chaucer’s other works, the loose gathering of Canterbury Tales rehearses tales of divergent strategy and scope for which contentious individual narrators were further invented. I will particularly consider "The Nun’s Priest’s Tale," but add some observations about Troilus and Criseyde.