SOURCE: Davis, Nina Cox. “Indigestion and Edification in the Guzmán de Alfarache.” Modern Language Notes: Hispanic Issue 104, no. 2 (March 1989): 304-14.

In the following essay, Davis discusses motifs of eating and digestion in Alemán's Guzmán de Alfarache to explore themes of literary deception.

The tendency of Guzmán criticism in recent decades has been to focus on the conclusion of Part II, the account of the narrator's alleged repentence and religious conversion while serving life sentence as a galley slave.¹ By reading the nearly one-thousand page fictive autobiography solely in terms of its closing chapters, as an example of—or response to—Counterreformation apologetics, modern readers cast Spain's first so-called picaresque novel as a startling anomaly within the genre which it created.

The outcome of the convict-turned-author's story must of course also be considered in light of his statement of intent in the opening pages of...