The Book of Duchess: Burgeoning of Chaucer as a New Storyteller

Chaucer's story-telling techniques, employed in the basic plot of a popular tale, demand the audience's intellect and imagination in ferreting out meaning or what might be seen as genuine authorial intention. Chaucer's eschewing of an authorial role as an absolute guide to meaning and his encouraging of a reader's cooperation in filling in the narrative halfway narrated or in making a judgment in the unsettling moments are frequently observed in The Book of Duchess. The Book of Duchess serves as the testing ground for Chaucer's later writings, especially, the Canterbury Tales, in the light of tale and tale-telling. The Book of Duchess is extraordinarily indirect in its style of conveying its meaning to a reader, because of its poetic structure characteristic of postponement and dilation. Such structural qualities that mark the Book of Duchess as most truly Chaucer's anticipate the direction of his creations as whole. Together with Chaucer's devious, roundabout approach to the theme of the tale by employing the delicate framework, the combination of "heterogeneous elements" or "opposites" is the storytelling method that serves as the rationale for his poem. In The Book of Duchess, these strategies. causing the effect of indeterminacy and semantic openendedness, are closely related to the audience's critical and active response.