Literary Techniques Used In 'The Miller's Tale'

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“The Miller’s Tale” is arguably one of the most well known story in The Canterbury Tales. It’s popularity is mostly due to it’s hilarious story and clever writing. The Miller’s Tale involves three stories that come together at the finale to create a mosaic of love, deceptions, and areses. This style of storytelling is often referred to as “parallel storylines”, meaning that there are several plots braided together to make the story. No one plot thread would be complete without the other, and The Miller's Tale knows just how to string them together. The three storylines that occur during the tale are the story of the unfaithful wife, Alisoun, and her lover, Nicholas; the story of Alisoun’s dim-witted husband, John; and the man whose heart was captured by Alisoun, Absolon. Nicholas lives with John and Alisoun as a boarder, and as he is courting Alisoun, he devises a plan to take her husband out of the picture for the night. Nicholas tells John that god will flood the world, and that they are to bring three tubs to the roof to survive. So John, being as gullible as he is, spends the night on the roof…show more content…
Seinfeld, in the episode “The Marine Biologist, shows very effectively how parallel storylines can be used as a punchline. The episode starts with one of the main characters, George, lying about being a marine biologist, and another, Krammar, going out to hit golf ball into the ocean, despite being told that it is bad for the oceanic life. At the end, Krammar hits one golf ball into the ocean, and that golf ball is stuck in the blowhole of a whale, which George dislodges. The setup and punchline to the story follows the same basic framework as “The Miller’s Tale”. The beginning displays the two stories, the middle displays how the stories happen, and the end is the punchline, the moment when everything comes
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