Lazarillo de Tormes
Books | Juvenile Nonfiction / Foreign Language Study / Spanish
The model of the picaresque novel, Lazarillo is a pseudo-autobiography. Lazaro, the 16c. town crier, relates, in epistolary form, a biased story of his youthful life, fortunes, and adversities. As the original picaro, Lazaro is a marginal figure, a delinquent who presents a partial and prejudiced version of the truth. As fiction, Lazarillo established the two-fold pattern of the inward journey-autobiography as apology and confession.