Lazarillo De Tormes

Lazarillo de Tormes: Happily Never After

Through the narration of his life story, Lázaro depicts the society he lives in as one in which hardship lurks behind every corner. Lázaro is tossed from one amoral master to another and it is evident early on that the young Lázaro belongs to the class of people who rely on cheating and lying to survive as he is “born to one thief and then adopted by another” (Bergman). Lázaro is cunning, learning the craft of deviousness through a series of oppressive jobs in which suffering and loss of innocence are revealed to be extremely entangled in his survival. Lázaro’s unfortunate upbringing coupled with the procession of his masters foreshadow the themes of the violence of poverty, the loss of innocence through

Through these themes, Lazarillo de Tormes deeply examines and critiques Spanish society in the sixteenth century and seeks to unveil injustice. The ending of the novella sees Lázaro mocked for his naivety as he turns a blind eye to the relations of his wife and of the archpriest. This novella exemplifies the genre of picaresque in the status of its main character, its pessimistic ideology, and its satiric intention (“Lazarillo De Tormes”). An identity that plagues Lázaro is his class, for he is born poor. Lázaro is a counterpart to the noblemen heroes in medieval literature, he is the traditional rascal like character in picaresque literature who seems neither to be a protagonist nor an antagonist. His group in society is subject to violence, whether it be the deliberate punishment by the rich, endlessly serving the rich, or just existing in a world sculpted for the rich (Bergman). There is

Lázaro serves a number of masters who make a living out of “exploiting the ignorant” (Bergman). The blind man collects money by radiating an air of religious devoutness, Lázaro describes him as an expert salesman, “He was an ace at his calling: he knew over a hundred prayers by heart; his voice was deep, calm, and very resonant, so that it rang through any church where he was praying” (11). This is Lázaro’s first encounter with false piousness though he echoes the deceit of the blind man as he begins habitually unstitching the bad of food from the bottom to steal food and swapping out coins to pocket money. The time spent with the priest is also plagued by deceit as the priest has a habit of stealing the holy bread from the church and locking it in “an old strongbox” (31) for himself to indulge in later. Lázaro, here, too turns to trickery as he pleads with a tinker who comes when the priest is away so that he can open the chest and nibble on bread freely. The exemplar of deception is found in the squire, a man who may be dressed well but who Lázaro increases realizes has nothing but appearances, “I found a small purse of smooth velvet, folded unto a hundred folds and containing not a single blanca or any sign that it had any for a long time” (65). In the squire, Lázaro sees pride transcend honesty. Lázaro’s story as we know it ends with him allowing the infidelity of his