Anyway, there's plenty more than just self-pitying personal identifications to hold one's interest here. In particular, the marked sterility and inconclusiveness of the Yeoman's life and work, so insistently reiterated throughout his prologue and tale, casts a rather sinister shadow when we remember that both characters and author are, at this point, approaching their own conclusions: the pilgrims of their pilgrimage (the Canon and his Yeoman join the party just five miles shy of Canterbury) and Chaucer of his work. The Yeoman's embittered admissions of failure - "For evere we lakken oure conclusioun" (672); "we concluden everemoore amys" (957) - raise the possibility of a similar inability to find a determinate or satisfying ending on the part of both pilgrims and poet. And, in fact, both pilgrims and poet will lack or be denied (deny themselves) the conclusion we have expected or anticipated for them: the pilgrims will never reach Canterbury because Chaucer will retract and disavow the narrative that promised to take them there. So in that sense, the Yeoman does seem to diagnose a generally applicable condition: pilgrims, author, and readers all lack "oure conclusioun," at least in one obvious and expected way. Whether this lack also implies that the pilgrimage/Chaucer have concluded "amys" is a different question.
Sticking with the Yeoman a little further, though, his professional dissatisfaction opens out onto a more general and more troubling skepticism about, and failure of, narrative and fiction. Beyond applying (maybe) to the Canterbury Tales as a whole, the Yeoman's complaint that "we concluden everemoore amys" characterizes his own tale equally well. The emphatic "poynt" (1480) on which he finally decides to end has in fact been stated, in its essentials, any number of times in the previous 900 lines: alchemy doesn't work, and you will waste your money and life trying to make it work. The way in which the Yeoman keeps constantly circling back to this "poynt" and reiterating it in itself substantiates the point: he really cannot conclude, and cannot structure his thoughts and words in such a way as to conclude. Tellingly, he says things "as they come to mynde, / Thogh I ne kan nat sette hem in hir kynde" (788-789). The Yeoman, in fact, might be the most digressive and nonlinear narrator we've seen since the Wife of Bath, straying several times from his invective against alchemy to wearingly catalogue various alchemical accessories and terms of art. His speech becomes more straightforward and coherent only when he shifts from his personal cri de coeur to his fictionalized narrative, and even then he returns again and again to belabor the mendacity of his fictional canon. The Yeoman himself recognizes how repetitive and narratively sterile he is being: "It weerieth me to telle of his falsnesse, / And nathelees yet wol I it expresse, / To th'entente that men may be war thereby, / And for noon oother cause, trewely" (1304-1307). And his self-diagnosis about being unable to conclude satisfactorily applies also to this mini-narrative, which has a curiously anti-climactic ending. The revelation to the dupe of the canon's duplicity is telescoped into a few terse and prosaic lines: "whan that this preest shoolde / Maken assay, at swich tyme as he wolde, / Of this recit, farwel! It wolde nat be" (1383-1385). Then it's back to the invective against alchemy, with a fresh inconsistency: the Yeoman continues to insist that there is no profit to be had in the practice, despite the fact that his own story has just shown someone who does pretty well for himself by it.
The fictional canon, of course, profits from alchemy only by embracing its unreality and emptiness; instead of vainly seeking after the real secret of transmuting substance and producing precious metal, this canon contents himself with pretending to do so in order to deceive others. This constant condemnation of the fictional canon's fraudulence, "his falshede" (1274), seems to indicate yet another connection between the Canon Yeoman's Tale and Chaucer's larger project. Does the Yeoman - does Chaucer himself - invite us to equate the fictional canon's falsehood with the falseness of narrative fiction, the kind of stories that produce no true gold, no genuine moral or meaning, stories of the type exemplified by "Sir Thopas" that are all solas without sentence? The Yeoman, conversely, appears to value narrative for its sentence alone and pays little heed to solas. To return to the lines I quoted a little earlier, the Yeoman continues to hold forth about the canon's falsehood, even though it wearies him and, most likely, his audience, "[t]o th'entente that men may be war thereby, / And for noon oother cause, trewely" (1306-1307). Narrative, speech, language are delivery mechanisms for morals and messages, nothing more; pleasure, emotional effect, and aesthetics don't enter into it and would, I think, in the Yeoman's eyes be of a piece with the canon's reprehensible "falsehede." The Yeoman's deficiencies as a narrator, in other words, really indicate his suspicion of narrative - a suspicion that is hardly confined to his own character and that may, in fact, contribute to or parallel Chaucer's own imminent failure or refusal to conclude his collection of narratives.
And, since it's late and I'm tired, and in the spirit of form following content, I also will conclude this post inconclusively - "amys," if you like.
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