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The question of authorial stance, along with the narrator's sympathy for or censure of characters, is an age-old conundrum. This is particularly true of doctrinal texts with a strong element of conflict. In Chaucer's Troylus and Criseyde, a fourteenth century retelling of thwarted love during the Trojan War, the Christian narrator should condemn the affair between the two lovers, but the hints of a new humanism instead turn the narrator into a divided self, advocating romantic love while at the same time urging morality.
Schricker proposes the model of a multifaceted psyche, claiming: “The narrator's behavior at the end of Troylus and Criseyde may, indeed, be viewed as a neurotic crisis....” At certain times he seems to be vicariously participating in the sexual union, crying, “O blysful nyght,” and “Why nad I swych on with my soule ybought...?” (3:1317, 1320). The epilogue is perhaps the trickiest to navigate, split between a sympathy for physical love and obeisance to a higher authority. In a sense, the narrator is performing a self-analysis, trying to identify contrary forces within himself. Schricker relies on a Freudian template, with the narrator as the individual's ego, the plot of the tale as the id, and the twin voices of Christian morality and philosophical ethics as the superego. The narrator's vacillating behavior thus emerges as the ego's mediating between the id of the tale and the objective reality represented by the audience. Or, as the study concludes, the narrator “functions most simply as a human being struggling through the difficult process of making an identity by integrating the conflicting components of self and reality.”