Please provide a character analysis of one of the characters in the prologue to Canterbury Tales.

Chaucer's
Generalis a robust celebration of human diversity, yet it also engages in social stereotypes. As
an Estates , its purpose is to show the various members of the medieval feudal estates and to
mock members of society in terms of their deviation from the ideal of their estate. The feudal
society claimed that society is strongest when every member stays in place and fulfills the
duties of the place into which he or she is born. Chaucer the Pilgrimthe naive narrator of the
Prologueclaims everyone is "worthy," yet it becomes clear quite soon that the reader
must find ways in which worthiness is compromised by individual pilgrim's tendency to want to
rise to a higher status or to abandon the standards of behavior assigned to a specific way of
life.

Those who fight must protect the state from harm through battle, but
they should do so only for noble causes and by fighting according to the chivalric ideal. Among
the knight, the squire, and the yeoman, it seems that the knight most upholds these ideals yet
also seems to have become something of a mercenary in the era's crusades. Terry Jones'
book Chaucer's Knight details some of the nuances in the sketch the
prologue offers, and "The Knight's Tale" is certainly marked by the knight's
complicated relationship to love and war. The Squire is motivated more by romance than political
idealism, using the tools of chivalry to achieve courtly attention, and the Yeoman is even
further removed from the ideal.

Similarly, those who praythe Prioress, the
Monk, and the Friarcreating a descending scale in terms of those who pray on behalf of others.
While the Prioress seems to care more for social than spiritual grace, the Monk himself seeks to
ignore his order's rules, and the Friar is downright sinful in his practice. The simple parson
is the pilgrim who most exemplifies the ideals of his place and is least ironically
portrayed:

He was a shepherde and noght a mercenarie. And
thogh he hooly were and vertuous, He was to synful men nat despitous, (Gen Prologue, lines
514€“16)

Among those who workthe majority of the
pilgrimsChaucer offers a range of figures who skirt the demands of honest labor. The Miller, for
instance, keeps his finger on the scale when measuring wheat. The Cook has a nasty open wound on
his leg. The Clerk from Oxford studies by living off of others' money. The Shipman seems more
pirate than noble wayfarer.

The game in the General Prologue is to read the
details offered casually about each pilgrim and see in what ways they are drifting from their
estate's ideal. Chaucer's own poetry is lively enough to suggest a complex , but the poem does
not fully realize round characterization such as one finds in Shakespeare. , the juxtaposition
of characters among each other, and the linking of pilgrim to tale told creates a more
interesting mode of characterization than one expects in medieval
literature.