Chaucer's Knight's tale is romantic, full of pageantry, philosophical. The Miller's Tale constitutes a complete change of pace. The Miller's prologue is a defense of all comedy--with all that is implied in difference of tone, level of diction, intellectual attitudes, and morality. Still, it offers serious commentary on human life.

The Knight's Tale, a justification of the ways of God with his creatures written in a manner characteristic of the gentry and the knightly classes, uses an elevated style; it is romantic and thought-provoking. The Miller's Tale emphasizes reliance on instincts and has only enough religious ties to make its ambience familiar; it features common men and women, uses a plainer style, is realistic and laugh-provoking. The antithetical elements in the two tales help create subtle commentary of one on the other and on all of human life.

The Knight's Tale is tied to man's physical prowess on the field of battle, the control exerted by moral codes over the sexual appetite, the acquisition of viruous resignation to the will of God (although it has its dark side).

In the Miller's Tale the shift is to the immediate and limited goal of gratifying the appetite as an end in itself. The tale fits the character of the Miller. The earthy, vigorous, ribald, tactless cheat suits the tale of deception, except for its polished cleverness.

     The Miller's Tale has nuances of character and intricacies of situation. Chaucer is free of the faint doubt as to the freedom of his actors which makes for poignancy in Knight's tale. Ironies abound including Absolon's and "hende" Nicholas' names, and the way in which the anal-retentiveness and squeamish spotlessness of Absolon are punished with terrible aptness at the end. Irony results from the range of theological and romantic associations which are woven into the comic and realistic fabric. In this story, self-will and self-gratification are characteristics of characters to the end, and the laws of canniness, deception, self interest, and revenge substitute for trials and penance, reward and regeneration in the romantic world.

      Yet the latter is ever present.  Associations with the romantic world abound: ceremonial wooing and singing, the use of a vocabulary drawn from the tales of the nobility, the parody of religious materials like the Song of Solomon and Noah's flood which appears as a leitmotiv throughout the major parts of the story, the range of holy and unholy names.

Descriptions fit characters. Nicholas is clever, conniving, discreet, self-interested and sly, retiring, smelling as sweet as a young girl, fastidious and knowledgeable, likes the gay life but depends on the support of his friends. He and Absolon alternate between victory and defeat despite his cleverness.

John is jealous but has married a very young woman who has many affinities with the world of untamed nature: Alisoun is compared to the weasel, the small, sour blackthorn, the pear tree, the soft woolly lamb, the swallow, the kid or calf gamboling behind its mother, the primrose, the skittish colt, and the piggesnye fit to grace a bed. All suggest irresponsible and unburdened pastoral innocence or the barnyard teeming with life and energy, devoid of any intellectualized sentiments, but replete with appetite, instinct, and the exuberance of nature. Her white dress suggests cleanliness and purity but are offset by references to a "likorous" eye. She is given the value of the shining noble coin. The list of her physical parts points to the ripe and ready creature who reaches her natural destination at the end.

Ll 163-198 show us Nicholas as a man of action. We are given few details about his appearance as opposed to all we are told about Absolon.
     The two are very different. Absolon is as sexually aroused when he sees Alisoun in Church as Nicholas was when playing with her. But he is not direct. He is ritualistic and ceremonial.

Two plots are brought together with the wooing of Alison by Absolon and the scheme of Nicholas to outwit the stupid carpentar, John. Medieval scholar Paul Ruggiers suggests that our pity for John is limited--not enough to make us resent Nicholas' deception.

Concrete details make the story realistic. The extravagant deception and later actions bring us into the world of comedy. When the tubs are ready, John sleeps and Nicholas and Alisoun disport counterpointed ironically by the orderly and regulated world of moral action (ll 546-48). Absolon's wooing becomes a vehicle of poetic justice. The remotely biblical tone of his prayer to Alison, and the debased tone of Alison's reply, are again ironic. Ll 590-605. In the end there is an inevitable and necessary justice working.

Chaucer holds up the mirror to human nature without insisting that any tale represents the whole of human behavior and without intending us to believe that human nature as here depicted is the norm or is to be emulated.
     The story arises out of what is uniquely human--the ability to laugh at oneself and others. In a plot that looks speciously like order but amounts in the end to the triumph of disorder, the comic writer makes what is ultimately a moral statement. If the triumph here of the improbable seems more pessimistic than the affirmation of love and order in the Knight's tale, it is Chaucer who holds both views and they are both essential to the vision of the human community on pilgrimage. Man is unique as a rational creature, but he is also perverse. That he can laugh is his saving grace, for by laughing he may also learn.
     The Miller's Tale has important things to say about the human situation. The values of the normative world impinge on the story and certain assumptions in a carefully ordered nature support them: the attraction of the young to each other; the peril of marriage between the old and the young; the temporary superiority of instinct to reason. Out of these grow the comic resolutions: the punishment of stupidity, the alternation of success and failure; the victory of unreason over convention. The meanings the fablieaux contain must take into account the values that are being vindicated.