The tales are examples of impersonated artistry because they concentrate not on the way preexisting people create language but on the way language creates people. They detail how what someone says "im-personates" him or her, that is, turns the speaker into a person, or better, a personality (I prefer this word to "person" because "personality" suggests something that acts like, rather than "is," a person). What this implies for the concrete interpretation of the poem is that the relation that I have been questioning between the tales and the frame, or between the tales and their historical or social background, needs to be reversed. The voicing of any tale, the personality of any pilgrim, is not given in advance by the prologue portrait or the facts of history, nor is it dependent on them. The personality has to be worked out by analyzing and defining the voice created by each tale. It is this personality in the foreground, in his or her intensive and detailed textual life, that supplies a guide to the weighting of details and emphasis, the interpretation, of the background, whether portrait or history. To say, for example, that the Miller's Tale is not "fitted to its teller" because it is "too good" for him, because a miller or the Miller would not be educated enough or intelligent enough to produce it, is to move in exactly the wrong direction. In fact, it is just this sort of social typing that irritates and troubles the Miller himself, especially since both the Host and the general narrator social-typed him long before any Chaucer critic did (1.3128-31, 3167-69, 3182). The characters in his tale repeatedly indulge in social typing, and the Miller types several of them in this way. The Miller's handling of this practice makes it an issue in the tale, something he has opinions and feelings about. The end of the tale makes it quite clear how the maimed, uncomfortably sympathetic carpenter is sacrificed to the mirth of the townsfolk and the pilgrims; he is shouted down by the class solidarity of Nicholas' brethren: "For every clerk anonright heeld with oother" (1.3847). One could go on to show how the Miller's sensibility in the tale retrospectively and decisively inflects the portrait of him in the General Prologue, making it something quite different from what it appears to be in prospect…

From H. Marshall Leicester, Jr., “The Art of Impersonation: A General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales,” PMLA 95: 2 (Mar., 1980), 217-18.

The Miller launches what turns out to be a literary Peasants' Rebellion. His noisy vulgarity is the antithesis of the Knight's aristocratic reserve, but like the Knight he is a fighter and a champion. The Knight splinters lances; the Miller shatters doors by charging through them with his skull….

He will "quite" the Knight with a "noble tale" of his own and insists on telling it there and then The Miller has been a rebel against the Host's judgment, against the social order, and he is about to offend against propriety by telling a thoroughly indecent story. Yet our sympathies are entirely on his side against what we recognize instinctively as the Host's snobbishness and the Reeve's sanctimoniousness, for we know without having to be told that the Miller's drunkenness, impudence, and coarseness have the license of the time and season.

Alfred David, The Strumpet Muse (1976), 92-93.

For as soon as the claims of peasant class consciousness are put forward they are countered. The Reeve's Tale accomplishes this subversion in two ways. One is to reveal the disunity within the peasant class itself, not simply by the antagonism between the Reeve and the Miller but by the Reeve's own betrayal of class interests. He is himself both an agent of seigneurial control and has social ambitions: he began life as a carpenter, he is now a reeve, and his dress and diction reveal clerical ambitions. In short, he shows that the social identity asserted by the Miller is a fiction, that there is no class unity among the peasantry but only individuals.

Lee Patterson, “The Miller’s Tale and the Politics of Laughter,” 274

Two happy endings: in one, Palamon wins a wife but remains subject to fortune, mutability, disorder, and death; in the other, Arcite passes beyond all that to whatever destiny awaits the honorable among the pagan dead. It is helpful to recall at this point the conventional demande d'amour that ends Part I, the sort of elegant love question that had been fashionable in French and Italian courtly literature for some two centuries:

Yow loveres axe I now this questioun:

Who hath the worse, Arcite or Palamoun?

That oon may seen his lady day by day,

But in prison he moot dwelle alway;

That oother wher hym list may ride or go,

But seen his lady shal he nevere mo.

(I.I 34 7)

We know from many places, not least of them the proem to II Filostrato (Chaucer's source for the Troilus), that such questions are meant to yield more than one answer, and that a person is likely to choose according to his or her present circumstances--a choice contingent, not absolute. Though the love question in The Knight's Tale does not occur in the customary place--such a question concludes both The Parliament of Fowls and The Franklin's Tale--it comes naturally to one's mind there as well, for the ending closely recapitulates the earlier situation, in terms now metaphysically deepened: one knight is released from prison, the prison of this world; the other is in that sense prisoner still, but in sight of, and possessing, his beloved. Who has the better part? Whose destiny is most fortunate? The love question, one of the more trivial conventions of medieval love story, becomes in retrospect philosophical: it locates an unanswerable question at the heart of human experience after the Fall and before the birth of Christ. . . . In The Knight's Tale, the question is no easier to answer at the poem's end than it was before, a fact of real importance in describing the nature and intention of this poem. "I noot which hath the wofuller mester" (1.1340): "Now demeth as yow liste, ye that kan" (1.1353). If one thinks of the demande d'amour in this concluding position, one does so in terms far deeper than those in which it was first posed. But the repetition is itself serial: no confident answer is possible in either place.

V.A. Kolve, Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative (1984), 154

In addition, as Robert Lewis points out, the parody of romance through the fabliau is not original with Chaucer, but is characteristic of the English fabliau. Such parody is possible because the two genres inhabit the same social and ideological worlds. We must not, therefore, be too quick to applaud the Miller's generous vision of sexuality, or to view him as an "agent of disruption" who initiates a "countermovement of fabliaux revelry" against the dominant social ideology represented in the Knight and enforced by the Host. Both of these versions of the fabliau world are highly romanticized and sentimentalized, and women in the tales bear the cost of critics' sentimentality. If anything, the tale mirrors the dominant economics of love and marriage, even as it exploits that same economics for the purpose of humor and what some critics would like to consider a kind of natural justice. The Reeve’s Tale, the supposedly darker and less spirited of the two tales, strips the Miller's Tale of its pretenses, revealing the violence (including rape, in the case of the miller's wife), sexual vengeance, victimization, and class rivalry underneath the masculine cuckoldric economy of the fabliau. If anyone disrupts the ideological world of the tale-telling, it is the Reeve, not the Miller, because he exploits this ideology without mystification, showing it for the petty, stingy, and cruel world that it is.

Karma Lochrie, “Woman’s "Pryvetees" and Fabliau Politics in the Miller's Tale,” Exemplaria 6 (1994): 302-3.

So too the tale-tellers, the Knight and the Miller, are not as different as they seem; in fact, when we look more closely at their representations of women and their definitions of Woman in the ways I have suggested here, we may see their common interests and the collective effect of their two tales. . . .

Most prominently, the first two tales similarly inscribe violence against women at the margins of their respective plots—in what happens just before Arcite and Palamon's story begins, and in what nearly happens at the end of the Miller's—so that this violence frames the tales as a pair. Moreover, what the Knight doesn't have time to talk about, like Emily's rites in the temple of Diana, is often equivalent to what the Miller doesn't want to inquire too closely into, like Alisoun's (or his wife's) sexuality: again, women are thereby characterized in divers ways as fundamentally dangerous in the world just outside or narrowly averted by each narrative. The ideals that contain women in the polite genre and the joke that lets women go in the churlish genre direct attention away from the remote violence and the threats it brackets.

Elaine Hansen, Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender, 236-7