Although a first-time reader of The Canterbury Tales may be tempted to
skim or skip the links, they are important to Chaucer's design. The Canter-
bury Tales is an unfinished work; possibly Chaucer might have made
changes, had he lived. But it is clear from what we have that Chaucer had
begun to link each tale to the one before it, mainly by interspersing scraps
of conversation between the pilgrims. The links show that his intention
was not to assemble an anthology of disparate works, a medieval short-story
collection, but to build a larger work consisting of a group of short narratives
within and united to an overarching structure. For all their relative brevity,
the links between the tales serve several purposes: they tie the tales to each
other and to the pilgrimage frame; they provide dramatic continuity; they
develop the character of certain pilgrims; they allow some characters to act
as literary critics; and they establish Harry Bailly as a key principle of unity.

In the frame story, a group of individual shorter narratives are contained
within a longer overall narrative, or frame. The pilgrimage to Canterbury,
the overarching plot, constitutes the frame; the individual stories are like
pictures within that frame. The premise of The Canterbury Tales is that each
pilgrim will tell two tales going to and two tales coming from Canterbury.
Had Chaucer lived to finish his massive project according to plan, the
pilgrims would have reached Canterbury and then returned to London,
completing the frame. At that point the work would have been vast; the
audience would often have needed to be reminded of the relationship
between the individual tales and the frame. First and foremost, the links
serve this purpose: they join the parts to the whole.

It is obvious from Chaucer's careful work on the links between the first
three tales, those of the Knight, the Miller, and the Reeve, that he also
intended the links to provide linear continuity. The dramatic interaction

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