Piers Plowman

When discussing "Mystery Stories," it is not always clear what exactly constitutes one.  Based on the Auden reading and the "Five Essential Elements of a Mystery" in the Course Readings folder, the elements of a mystery story are disputed.  The latter lists the elements as the characters, setting, plot, problem, and solution.  For Auden, whose focus is on the detective story specifically, there's the milieu, the victim, the murderer, the suspects, and the detectives.  Or, in a broader sense: the setting, the person(s) wronged, those who wronged them, the suspects, and someone trying to iron out the conflict.  Looking at both of these definitions gives the general sense that the characters and the setting are important to the story, as they come up in both lists, and there's something that happens at some point during or before the timeline of the story which causes a conflict.

Extending this idea of what a mystery story is to Piers Plowman is difficult because the text itself is enough of a mystery. It is sufficiently difficult to figure out what is being said, let alone what it means.  Stories are built of paragraphs are built of sentences are built of words, and when the words aren't comprehensible, the whole construct collapses.

I've been able to glean the setting and a couple characters (thanks mostly to Professor Strickland's translation), but the other elements still seem uncertain and incomprehensible.  Even reading the translation just seems like a steady flow of babble and it's difficult to understand how this is communication.  The trivium of logic, grammar, and rhetoric appear to be largely absent.  The grammar is not what we would consider to be correct, or at least not what I would consider correct, meaning the rhetoric can't be, because it is built off of it.

So basically, I have no idea what is going on and am very confused.