The Monk In The Canterbury Tales

A monk is a member of a religious community that vows to be obedient so that they are able to be holy. However, the monk on his way to Canterbury couldn’t be any more different. Most monks fasten; spend their time in prayer, or studying lord’s word, however, this monk was different. He had a mare he was good too, whom he took hunting with him all the time. At this time hunters were not known as holy men. The monk was even known as one of the finest in his sport for hunting. His personality was very manly from the hunting perspective. Other characters claimed that the eyes were always at the top of his head. In this day in time, it signifies impatience and lust. We know that he was very lustful because he said in his tales that he was not pledged …show more content…
He was finely dressed of with fur-trimmed robes. He also had a gold pin with a love knot at the end of his hood. The gold was not the mark that identified someone as not religious. Monks who were religious would have had a rosary (Acosta, 1998).
The monk's point is that he wants to be self-identified. He’s making himself stand out in a community; he doesn’t care what anyone thinks. He doesn’t want everything that he has accomplished in life to be taken away from him like in Hercules situation. Though his actions wouldn’t convey it, we can see that he is nervous that this will be his life too, so he decided to turn away from the way of life that he had always known.
In the monk's tale, we see multiple literary devices that he used. In the introduction of his tale, the narrator starts it off by saying that “he is a good monk”, then saying that everything that would make the monk seem absurd. It states “hunters are not holy men. This is sarcastic irony because if he were a good monk he would spend his time praying and not hunting. Another device is a simile that we see about the bells on his horse. “ A jingling in the whistling wind as clear, aye, and as loud as does the chapel