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The Canterbury Tales | Perception and Reality in the “Miller's Tale”

In the following essay, Patrick J. Gallacher applies Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s ideas on perception to “the much-discussed portrait of Alison and to the perceptual responses of John, Absolon, and Nicholas” in “The Miller’s Tale.”

The “Miller’s Tale,” if not the fabliau as a genre, presents us with a pattern of mistakes in perception, a sharp, dramatic contrast between the real and the imaginary, which confirms basic assumptions about our world at the same time that it raises important questions. Although our sense of the real begins with what is both actual and possible in perception, it is easy to confuse the two, or to underestimate one or the other. The relevant truism, of course, is that we usually think we know what’s there, but we often don’t. In fact, the main comic incidents in the...

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