Trickster vs. Picaro

Native American stories often feature a character called the trickster, a comic figure who has both mortal weaknesses and supernatural powers. Recently, the term "trickster" has also appeared in criticism of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European literature, particularly in reference to the picaresque novel and its central character, the picaro (Spanish for "rogue"): and both live on the peripheries of society and are morally flawed.

Yet closer examination reveals that applying the term "trickster" to both characters obscures essential differences between them. The picaro—typically a male character—operates primarily as an agent of satire. Most commonly, the picaro's adventures begin when he spontaneously yields to his own roguish, though innocent, impulses. The picaro indulges in vices and follies freedom of the picaro and the hypocrisy of the safely ensconced social being—that the satire occurs.

But the trickster, usually an animal acting as a human agent, does not serve a satiric function. For while the picaresque novel takes place in and satirizes human society, the trickster operates in the ahistorical world of myth; where the targets of the picaresque novel are the idiosyncrasies and inconsistencies of a makes the trickster fundamentally antisocial, even anarchic, all the while helping listeners to avoid these flaws.

It is this combination of mythic setting and mortal weakness that determines the particular targets of the trickster's comic high jinks: the eternal and unchanging foibles of mortal beings. In one story, for example, a coyote trickster falls in love with a star. The trickster is quite tenacious and human, even though reaching beyond proper limits, but all the while they recognize in themselves the trickster's extravagant hopes.