The Narrator in Chaucer's Troilus

Abstract

The character through whose consciousness we witness the events of Troilus and Criseyde is more elusive but no less palpable than the characters he tells us about. He is characterized dramatically rather than descriptively-that is, we come to know him by what he says rather than what is said about him-but his presence is so fully realized that his role must be seriously reckoned in any evaluation of the poem. The extensiveness and palpability of his role and the stylistic range of his rhetoric distinguish him from the narrating personae of comparable long tales, such as the Aeneid, Don Quixote, and Tom Jones. And Troilus cultivates, to a greater degree than do any of these, the ironies implicit in the differing ranges of perceptiveness of the characters, the narrator, and the poet. In subtle but decisive ways the role of the narrator is central to the life of the poem. The narrator has received a large measure of his due in Professor Bloomfield's recent study, which shows how the poem articulates and consistently emphasizes a point of view removed from that of the characters of the story.1 But I think Professor Bloomfield leaves unclarified-or insufficiently stressed-the