The picaro and the Native American trickster

Calling two characters “tricksters” doesn't make them the same kind of character. That's the question to keep in mind as we move from Native American stories to European novels: does the shared label help us understand them, or hide something important?

We do get real similarities. Both characters have episodic adventures, live on society's edges, and have moral flaws. So this isn't a completely random comparison. But the next paragraph tells us that those common features conceal “essential differences.” Now I want to know what each character does in a story, not just what traits they share.

The picaro exposes society's hypocrisy. He openly enjoys the kinds of impulses other people condemn while secretly indulging in them themselves. Picture someone freely admitting that he likes gambling while his critics quietly gamble, too. The contrast makes the critics look hypocritical: why condemn his behavior while hiding your own?

A roguish outsider such as Han Solo can help us picture the general type, but the important feature here is more specific than being charming or breaking rules. The picaro's openness puts respectable society's dishonesty on display. Society responds by pushing him to the margins. His freedom is threatening because he reveals something its members would rather not acknowledge.

Now comes the Native American trickster. Usually an animal, this character belongs to a mythical setting and teaches us about individual moral weaknesses. The flaws aren't chiefly a way to make a corrupt society look bad. They're the trickster's own flaws, and listeners are supposed to recognize and avoid them.

Think of the general teaching method in a fable such as the tortoise and the hare. We don't need to believe that the race actually happened to understand the lesson about how to behave. That comparison helps us understand what a story with animal characters can do; it doesn't mean this account is identifying Aesop's characters as Native American tricksters. Here, the emphasis is on familiar human failings rather than the hypocrisy of one historical society.

Even the shared outsider status has a different explanation. Society marginalizes the picaro in response to his disruptive freedom. The trickster's own antisocial character puts the trickster outside ordinary social life. Same broad description—an outsider—but a different reason for it and a different literary purpose.

The coyote and the star make that purpose concrete. A coyote falls in love with something it cannot reasonably have. The star lifts the coyote into the sky and then drops it back to Earth. It's ridiculous, but we can also recognize ourselves in it. Haven't people wanted something far beyond their realistic reach? The story turns extravagant desire into an amusing, cautionary example.

The point isn't that a particular society secretly wants stars while condemning coyotes who admit it. That would resemble the picaro's role. Instead, the coyote's own excessive hopes expose a recurring human weakness. The comparison between these two characters therefore ends where we expected: their similarities are real, but using one label for both obscures the different work their stories perform.