In the Miller’s tale, there is no single character who is a righteous person. The carpenter John has a delusional jealousy of his wife because of her beauty and youth. Nicholas, knowing that Alison is already married, woos her and then tries to take her away from John by deceiving him. Absolon is too busy expressing his emotions towards Alison that he doesn’t care about anyone else and acts very selfishly. Lastly, Alison, John’s wife, is a hypocrite because she joins Nicholas’s plan and in front of her husband she acts like the innocent nice wife. Of course nothing ends out good for any of them. For what ever they have done they made a fool of themselves and “And every wight gan laughen at this stryf. (And every person did laugh at this strife.)” (3849) I think the miller is trying to reflect reality in his story. People can do really silly things for their greed, like in the story of the goose that laid golden eggs where the farmer killed the goose and couldn’t get any more golden eggs. The lesson is that anything overwhelming is worse than anything. Would the story have been different if any of those characters were less selfish?
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