SOURCE: Meeker, Joseph W. “The Pastoral and the Picaresque.” In The Comedy of Survival: Literary Ecology and a Play Ethic, pp. 50-73. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1997.

In this essay, Meeker considers the character of the picaro from the vantage point of the pastoral tradition in literature.

The world has often seemed like a scary place for people. Ours is not the first period in history to notice that there is much corruption in social and political structures, that conventional moralities do not address our real problems, that there are too many people for comfort, that the technologies that promised us ease have also damaged our lives and environments, and that crime and violence are escalating. It is not that the world is itself malevolent or that the gods are angry, for most modern people are well aware that the threats to human well-being are of our own...