ABSTRACT
In a polyphonic work, ‘apparent echoes and foreshado wings are not the product of the author’s plan, but of the characters’ obsessions’, and repetitions reflect the ‘return of the obsessed’ (Morson and Emerson 1990:250). One of the leading themes of the tale is man’s relationship with God. This was a basic concern of the late fourteenth century, at a time of shift from the single-voiced Word, the voice of God, the absolute, the epic voice, to the ambivalent, the polysemous, the polyphony of the novel. It is therefore not coincidental that Chaucer should have introduced theoriginally unequivocal-motif of belief in an omnipotent God, creator of the world and author of miracles, and that he should have played on it from different viewpoints (Paull 1971; Farrell 1970, 1979).
