An organizing feature of The Summoner’s Tale is the ironic contrast between what the Friar advocates and what he preaches. The Friar preaches desire for higher things, but his own appetite is for food and things of this world. His sermon on fasting and gluttony is accompanied by his ordering a meal considered rather gluttonous. He preaches patience and self-control, but he himself gives way to wrath. He sermonizes on the value of the “poor in spirit” and poverty, and yet he is openly insistent that money be given to him and not other monks or friars. And while he is supposedly pure and chaste, he is overly familiar with Thomas’ wife, kissing and fondling her.
The Summoner’s Tale is also ripe with hypocritical paradoxes, many of which have as their base the difference between eschatology and scatology — that is, the concern for an afterlife juxtaposed with the obscenities of this earthly life. As noted earlier (see the analysis for The Miller’s Tale), this theme is also treated extensively and with much more comic power in the earlier tale. Chaucer uses the fart as an ironic comment on the friar’s claim that he can talk to God, and the fart, like a stroke of thunder, answers back. That the friar believes he must portion out the fart equally among the other friars shows him to be concerned more with scatology than with eschatology. It is further ironic that the lord’s meat carver is the one who devises a plan to split the fart. This reinforces the notion that the friar and his order are interested more with the obscenities of an earthly life that with the occupation of saving souls, their own included.
