Picaresque

The picaresque novel is "a genre of prose fiction that depicts the adventures of a roguish but appealing hero, usually of low social class, who lives by his wits in a corrupt society." The name comes from the Spanish pícaro, "rogue" or "rascal," and the genre began with the anonymous Spanish novel Lazarillo de Tormes (1554). Picaresque novels take "the form of 'an episodic prose narrative'" in a realistic style, often with "elements of comedy and satire," little overall plot, and a hero who does not reform: "Once a pícaro, always a pícaro." Don Quixote is a "quasi-picaresque narrative," and Defoe's Moll Flanders and Twain's Huckleberry Finn carry the form forward.

The type matters to serial writers because it solves two problems at once: a hero who "rarely deigns to hold a job" but always has a scheme generates episodes indefinitely, and the loose, episodic shape suits chapter-by-chapter publishing, the macro structure mapped in choosing a structure for a web serial. Against the bildungsroman it is the counter-arc: the coming-of-age hero is transformed by experience, while the picaro survives it unchanged, so a picaresque grows by accumulation rather than development.