SOURCE: Norval, M. N. “Original Sin and the ‘Conversion’ in the Guzmán de Alfarache.” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 51, no. 4 (October 1974): 346-64.

In the following essay, Norval argues against critics such as Alexander Parker and Moreno Báez who claim that Guzmán's final conversion is real, charging instead that Guzmán de Alfarache is a pessimistic story about man's inability to gain salvation without God's grace.

The Guzmán de Alfarache is a pseudo-autobiography in which a pícaro tells the story of his evil life and his supposed conversion.¹ More critics than not have dismissed the conversion as hypocritical, as Alexander Parker has pointed out,² but the prevailing critical view at present accepts it as genuine.³ This view, expounded primarily by Moreno Báez and Alexander Parker, takes Guzmán's tale at face value, and sees the novel as a working-out of orthodox Catholic doctrines concerning...