The Pardoner’s Tale is one of the many short stories in Chaucer’s renowned Canterbury Tales. The narrator in the story is the Pardoner, a man endowed by the Catholic Church to sell indulgences. One of the key characters in the story is Death. He is a character surrounded by ambiguity, leaving fear in all the villagers, but he is never explicitly identified by the Pardoner. However, Chaucer, through the Pardoner’s voice, seems to hint that a mysterious old man who is supposedly immortal might be Death himself. Regardless, this is never stated outright, and readers must interpret the story themselves.
The Pardoner starts his tale by introducing the three protagonists. They do not have names, but they are acknowledged as degenerate drunkards who live in Flanders.1 While enjoying their drink, a dead man is carried past them, and they first learn about this supposed thief who is terrorizing the town, and the townspeople call him Death.2 Swearing an alliance with each other, they decide to venture on a mission to track down Death and kill him. 3
On the road, the three degenerates encountered an old, mysterious man who claimed to be immortal. He longs to die and escape this wretched world, but Death will not take him. When the drunkards pester him regarding Death, he tells them, “If you are so glad to find Death, turn up this crooked path…I left him in that grove under a tree…There you shall find him.”4
The three drunkards listen to him, but instead of finding the thief, Death, they find glorious treasure5; gold in vast quantities; more money than they could ever dream of. Like a dragon’s treasure, it filled them with greed. Slowly but surely, they all connived to betray each other.6 Two of them straggled the younger, and the younger poisoned the other two people’s wine. In the end, they all died.
From a glance, it appears that they never found Death. And while they never encountered the person called Death, they did, eventually, meet death through their greed. This literate poetry should not be overlooked. The mysterious man was not lying. Upon finding the treasure, they all met death, as he predicted. As to whether the immortal man was Death, that remains uncertain. Chaucer certainly seems to suggest that he was by saying he was immortal. It also seems too coincidental that one of the drunks seemed to foreshadow his own demise when he said, “He [Death] has slain a thousand in this pestilence…before you come before him, it seems to me that you would be best if you were wary of such an adversary. Be ready to meet him at all times.”7
- Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales (public domain: https://www.ronpaulcurriculum.com/CanterburyTales2007.pdf), 20. ↩︎
- Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, 23. ↩︎
- Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, 23. ↩︎
- Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, 24. ↩︎
- Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, 24. ↩︎
- Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, 25-26. ↩︎
- Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, 23. ↩︎
Asher Sisneros 
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