SOURCE: Babcock, Barbara A. “’Liberty's a Whore’: Inversions, Marginalia, and Picaresque Narrative.” In The Reversible World: Symbolic Inversion in Art and Society, edited by Barbara A. Babcock, pp. 95-116. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1978.

In the essay which follows, Babcock discusses the social role of the picaresque hero, focusing on early Spanish picaresques as well as the film Easy Rider.

In one of the most recent picaresque fictions, my colleague Zulfikar Ghose's The Incredible Brazilian, his picaro-narrator informs his reader in the prologue:

I am aware of the danger of fantasies, of adding spice to situations which were no more memorable than a frugal meal of rice and beans. I am aware, too, that since the reader is inevitably going to consider some aspects of my narrative as unbelievably impossible, I have the temptation before me of straining incredibility still further by making incredibility a kind of...