SOURCE: Parker, Alexander. “Zenith and Nadir in Spain.” In Literature and the Delinquent: the Picaresque in Spain and Europe, 1599-1753, pp. 53-74. New York: Greenwood Press, 1989.

In the following excerpt, Parker focuses on Historia de la vida del buscón and the development of the character Pablo.

The first conscious attempt to find a middle-way solution to the problem of presenting delinquency in polite literature led the genre in a new direction. The next novel to appear was Marcos de Obregón (1618)¹ by the poet and musician Vicente Espinel (1550-1624), who, after an adventurous and peripatetic youth, took orders and became choir-master of a Madrid church. His novel is to a considerable extent a genuine autobiography and it has proved possible to disentangle the fact from the fiction.² Espinel cast his memoirs in the form of fiction in order to make them more palatable, for his story links...