The Sea Captain's Tale:
The author uses direct characterization to describe the monk, the merchant, and the wife. He starts off by saying the wife is beautiful, the merchant is stingy, and the monk was handsome and well liked. Chaucer's tone is somewhat mocking and sarcastic when he is speaking of the wife and how rich men's beautiful wives like to be sociable and plan parties and buy dresses, but the husband doesn't want to pay for it so they must find some other man to pay for it. The tone is satirical in the case of the monk because the monk is conniving and when the wife asks him for money he secretly borrows it from the husband so that she will sleep with him. It is also ironic because the wife couldn't directly ask the husband for money, and the husband was rich but he wouldn't give money to his wife. The author was also being very ironic when the wife said the husband wasn't good in bed, but at the end he was very...vivacious. Chaucer used a really funny pun at the end when he said, "So my tale ends: and while we live may God give us tail in plenty!" The meaning of the pun was to say he hopes he gets to sleep with a lot of women while he's alive, and the pun was on the words "tale" and "tail". There is a lot of sexual humor in this story especially at the end when the wife says she'll pay her husband back in full for the 100 francs she spent.
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