“The Pardoner’s Tale”
Below are general answers to the questions for “The Pardoner’s Tale”. For each answer though, it is up
to you to determine the details from the text that can be used support the answer.
1. The Pardoner himself is a greedy man. He pardons people’s sins for money and he expects his
payment to be silver pins and gold rings. He is cheating people by claiming that he will help them get
into heaven. This affects the reading of his story because his actions are as bad as those of the three
young men which makes the reader question his motives.
2. C
3. This line of dialogue from the passage provokes a decision by the three young men because they see
it as a challenge. They claim to not be afraid of death which leads them to search for Death. They
unwisely believe that they are capable of beating Death which leads them on their foolhardy mission
which ultimately leads to their death.
4. This line of dialogue from the passage foreshadows future events in the story because the three
young men ultimately do meet Death, but not how they expected. They thought that death would come
in the form of a person which they would defeat, but in fact it came in the form of their own greed. The
gold, which was the cause of their greed, was under the tree where the old man claimed Death would
be. The gold in fact was the death.
5. The discovery of the gold changes the direction of the plot because it is the undoing of the young
men. Without the gold, their true natures would not have been revealed. The gold causes them to
make traitorous decisions based on greed and turn against one another which ultimately leads to their
deaths.