Pardoner's Tale

     It's ironic that the Pardoner tells such a tale of greed, because he himself is greedy. By using irony in the Pardoner's Tale, Chaucer is criticizing the church system. Like many Pardoners of his time, the Pardoner would accept money in exchange for forgiveness of sins but instead of using the money for church charity, he used it for his own satisfaction.
     Three men were told they could find Death under a tree upon a hill but when they got there, they found money instead. Since they found the gold they all thought that they were not looking for Death anymore but in reality they really are, they just do not know it.
     Another ironic thing about this story is that the three men were going to go "kill Death". You can not kill Death because Death is not living. You can not kill something that is already dead. Chaucer is personifying Death in this story.
     The Pardoner's Tale is such an ironic tale because, he is greedy and stole money from the church by keeping it, but he talks about how people should not be greedy and should do the right things. To deceive mankind is the Pardoner's business. He takes money from people to pardon their sins, but keeps the money for himself, yet his story gives the moral of, "be a good person".

Pygmalion Essay

      Pygmalion was once a myth, turned into a book, now a movie. And each tells pretty much the same story, but in a different way. Love comes to us in mysterious ways, weather its a friendship love or a romantic love. Sometimes you even have to make it come to you.

      In the mythological story of Pygmalion, the king of Kypros (Cyprus), Pygmalion falls in love with an ivory statue in which he created. He falls in love with this statue because he feels there are no women on the island that amount to his expectations, so he creates this statue in image of his perfect ideal woman. After doing so, he prays to the goddess Aphrodite to make her real, and Aphrodite does so. But in the book and movie, the main characters, Higgins and Eliza, do not exactly fall in love. They end up having a more friendship relationship. The similarity between the two stories, someone is asking a favor of the other. Eliza asks Higgins for speaking lessons, and Pygmalion asks for his statue to come to life.

      Another theme in this story is feminism. In the book and movie, Eliza is mainly the center point. She starts off god awful and brutally annoying, but that is because she does not know how to speak proper. After months of training, she learns to speak proper English, and is passed off as a princess. She ends up taking things into her own hand after Higgins would not praise her the way she felt fit. I can relate to this because well, I am a female, and I tend to take things into my own hands when I do not feel things have gone the way I want them to.

      In the end, love comes in different ways, and it goes away, too. Friends come and go, lovers do so as well. Most of us wish for the perfect soulmate, or to be understood. And to be understood, you have to present yourself properly.