The Lazarillo de Tormes

One of the most important works of the history of Spanish literature is, without a doubt, The Lazarillo de Tormes. This novel is included within the picaresque genre and tells us the life of a young man from Salamanca who, Due to his humble origin, he is forced to work for others as a servant or raised. During his work, Lázaro will be forced to use picaresque and ingenuity in order to satisfy his appetite and survive. The clergyman, the blind man or the squire are some of the masters Lazarillo has to serve and all of them end up shaping his way of life and his personality.

In this lesson from a TEACHER we are going to talk to you about Lazarillo de Tormes with a brief summary of this novel by analyzing all the treatises that make up the piece. In this way you will be able to know the adventures and misfortunes of Lázaro, one of the best known characters of the Spanish Golden Age.

Index

1. The Lazarillo de Tormes: plot
instagram story viewer
2. Summary of Lazarillo de Tormes: Treaty 1
3. Treaty 2 of Lazarillo de Tormes: brief summary
4. Lazarillo de Tormes: summary of treatise 3
5. Treaty 4 of Lazarillo
6. El Lazarillo: Summary of Treaty 5
7. Treaty 6 of Lazarillo de Tormes
8. Short summary of Treaty 7 of Lazarillo
9. Conclusions about El Lazarillo de Tormes
10. The characters of Lazarillo de Tormes
11. What is the main theme of the play El Lazarillo de Tormes?
12. Who is the author of the work El Lazarillo de Tormes?

The Lazarillo de Tormesis one of our top works of Spanish literature since it meant the inauguration of the modern novel anticipating, thus, the Quixote that was written by Cervantes later. There is a lot of controversy about the authorship of it and, therefore, in this other lesson you will know Who is the author of Lazarillo de Tormes.

El Lazarillo is a picaresque novel in which the protagonist, Lázaro, explains the adventures and misfortunes that he has experienced throughout his life. Originally from Salamanca, very close to the river Tormes, this boy is part of a humble family and, therefore, has to serve people as a servant to be able to work and earn some money.

To give you a summary of Lazarillo de Tormes we are going to explain to you that, throughout the novel, we witness the life of this young man who grows up with different masters, among which stands out the clergyman, the blind man, the friar, the nobleman, etc.. We see the theme of the picaresque through the attitudes that, over time, the protagonist takes, he begins to learn from life and to understand that, to save himself, he has to use all his ingenuity and mischief.

During the course of Lazarillo de Tormes we see how the protagonist is acquiring a "mischievous" education that begins after the deceit of the blind man. His humble and kind origin is broken after the experiences that he is acquiring with his work and the relationships he establishes with the rest of the characters in the novel.

Next we are going to talk to you about him Lazarillo Tormes making a summary by treaties that will help you better understand the fundamentals of this literary work.

We begin this brief summary of Lazarillo de Tormes talking about the first treatise with which the novel begins. Here we meet Lázaro, a boy who comes from a humble family that lives near the river Tormes. His origins are also shameful because her father is a thief and her mother, when she separated from her husband, married a black man with whom she had a child, a behavior that, at the time, was very frowned upon.

When Lazarus grows up, his mother forces him to work with a blind beggar as a guide in order to earn some money, or at least not be another burden on his mother. Here begins the adventures of Lazarillo who meets an extremely greedy man and who, therefore, barely feeds his worker. The kid has to figure out how to eat and survive.

To be able to quench your appetite and thirst for it, Lázaro is forced to use the picaresque to deceive his master and to be able to eat in more quantity than the miser wants to give him. Some of the "tricks" he does is, for example, make a hole in the blind man's jug of wine so that he can drink from it without him noticing.

However, the blind man does notice the cunning of the young man and punishes him frequently with sticks and blows. After the narration of different adventures and traps that Lázaro devises, in the end, he decides to abandon the blind man and change his master.

In this other lesson from a teacher we will discover the Lazarillo characters and their characteristicsso you can delve into each one of them.

We continue with this summary of each chapter of Lazarillo de Tormes. Now we are going to focus on the second treatise that starts from the moment in which the protagonist abandons the blind man and, after a time being a beggar, starts working as a clergyman's assistant to give mass.

The young man believes he has risen to a position within the social hierarchy, but nothing is further from reality: the cleric also turns out to be a miser and, in addition, mistreats Lázaro; in fact, he only feeds him when they go to funerals, the rest of the day he does not feed him in any way.

Faced with this painful situation, Lázaro finds himself with the need to reuse his wit and picaresque in order to satisfy his appetite, this is how he begins to eat them to eat secretly from the clergyman and, for example, one of the anecdotes that appear in the The novel is that the young man makes a copy of the key to the place where the bread was kept and when the clergyman asked him for an explanation, Lázaro blamed the mice.

In the end, the cleric will discover that it is Lazarus who is stealing his bread and throws him out of the house.

Now we are going to talk about the third treaty within this summary of the Lazarillo that we are carrying out. At this time the protagonist, after being dismissed by the clergyman, he moves to Toledo and there he will meet a squire that he will give her the opportunity to work as his servant. The young man believes that he is a rich man and with him he will not go famine but, nevertheless, when he reaches the bedroom of the Squire sees that this man lives in the most absolute misery and that with the suits and bearing of him the only thing he wants is keep up appearances.

And with this master Lazarus will pass it the same as with the others: he will starve. The main difference of this treaty with the others is that, in this one, the young man will not be able to steal food from his master because he does not have it. So he will be forced to manage to eat him but also so that the love of him can feed.

The squire is a man who, above all, wants to await appearances And no matter how starving he is, he will never beg, for food, or go to work. He wants to maintain his status even if his life depends on it. In the end, the landlord will come to collect the rent, something that the squire will not be able to pay and, therefore, he will leave home, abandoning Lázaro to his fate.

In the fourth treatise on Lazarillo de Tormes we find that the squire's neighbors help Lázaro to find a new master to serve: the Friar of Mercy. He is about a religious man who loved to go for walks, hike and discover new places.

Lázaro follows his new master on his excursions and even during the first eight days they walk so much that the young man's shoes end up breaking. Faced with this situation, the Friar will buy him a new pair of shoes so that he can continue his march, however, the young man will get tired of walking so much and end up abandoning him.

Image: Slideshare

We continue with the summary by treatises of Lazarillo de Tormes. Next we come to the fifth, at which time Lázaro has a bulldero as his master, an official who worked in the service of the church. However, despite this being his primary job, the truth is that he's nothing but a scammer that he is in league with the bailiff to make money selling bulls, that is, a document that is expended in the Middle Ages and that he could absolve a person of a Christian sin or fault that had task.

However, the business does not prosper as they would like and in the end they end up inventing a fight between the buldero and the bailiff saying that the latter had not died thanks to divine intervention, since he is the possessor of a bulla. Seeing the type of person this master was, Lázaro decides to abandon him and go find another more honest one.

Image: Slideshare

In this treatise on the novel by Lazarillo de Tormes, the young man again changes his master to, on this occasion, serve a tambourine painter. But she will spend a very short time with him and will end up going with a chaplain after having entered the interior of a church.

The chaplain thus becomes his new master and he will give him a donkey and jugs of water so that the young man can sell it to the people of the city. This is when Lazaro, for the first time, has a serious and paid work Well, every Saturday, he received commissions from his masters.

Given the new privileged situation in which Lázaro is now, he stays for four years serving his master, time that he used to save money and buy clothes and his first sword. When he considers that he has learned enough, he ends up abandoning the chaplain and his new office as well.

And to finish with this brief summary of the Lazarillo we are going to focus on the last treatise: the seventh. Here, our protagonist he manages to become the town crier of Toledo, an honorable job that allowed him to live well, without luxuries but without miseries. The archpriest of San Salvador married Lázaro with one of his maids despite the fact that there are rumors about the intimate relationships that exist between the priest and this woman.

However, Lazaro turns a deaf ear to this talk and decides to marry and live happily with his wife. The novel ends by introducing us to a man who has reached stability in his life.

Image: Slideshare

With The Lazarillo de Tormesthe picaresque novel was inaugurated in Spain, a literary subgenre that was created in our country and that, at first, was widely rejected by the most conservative critics. Let us remember that the main theme that is discussed in this novel is morality since, during the adventures of the young Lázaro, we meet many characters who are well considered within society and who, in reality, present a false sense of honor.

The characters are the faithful reflection of the moral and social hypocrisy, therefore, the dignity of all of them appears battered. The work seems to give us the message that life is hard and, in this situation, each one looks out for his own interests without caring one iota having to step on others. In this novel it is denounced that, in society, people who seem "virtuous" are only an appearance of virtuous since that seems to be the important thing: it does not matter who you are but act like it and, thus, even if you are not you will seem.

The vision that Lazarillo de Tormes offers us is a disenchanted vision of society and of the human being. Because of this message, the Inquisition banned this work and included it in his famous list of "prohibited books". However, its influence was unstoppable and, thanks to Lazarillo and his picaresque tendency, it was possible to mark a before and after in the history of literature.

The Lazarillo de Tormes charactersThey are very significant since they provide us with a very significant vision of all the types of people that existed in Spain at the time. We must not forget that this work is a great reflection of the society of the moment and, in it, we are made a very faithful portrait of some well-regarded personalities at the time.

Here we leave you some of the most prominent characters and important of this work:

• Lazarillo: Obviously, this is the most important character in the play. It is about the protagonist who has to become a rogue in order to survive in a hostile world full of false appearances
• The blind: He is the first owner of Lazarillo and is the one who most influences the boy who learns from him that he has to be smarter than anyone to be able to save himself
• Cleric: he is another of the protagonist's owners, a character who, unlike his social position, embodies greed and corruption
• Squire: this character of Lazarillo teaches the protagonist that the world of appearances goes much further since, in this In this case, we meet a person who barely has enough to eat but who, looking at the gallery, seems to be very rich and wealthy
• Friar of Mercy: Another character linked to the religious world reappears. In this case, the friar is actually a very different person from his position. He is promiscuous, playful and also corrupt, therefore, little to do with the ideals defended by the Catholic Church he represents.
• Buldero: This character also refers to religion since he represents a very typical figure of the time, the one who sold bulls to expunge sins. However, this character led an authentic "mafia" of religious forgiveness in exchange for money

The main theme of the work El Lazarillo de Tormes is false morality. The author makes a strong complaint to the false honor and hypocrisy reigning in the Spanish society of the time.

Throughout the text we see that life is presented to us from a crude point of view and in which people cannot be honored; on the contrary: they must be roguesto survive. And no one is saved from this social corruption: neither the apparently rich, nor the clergyman, nor the most humble. All Lazarillo owners end up having a selfish and unscrupulous attitude that is perfectly camouflaged with their social image.

As the text indicates, it is not necessary to be virtuous: it is necessary to pretend it. Therefore, the whole work will revolve around this idea of ​​the false morality and the world of appearances. Due to this issue, the Inquisition prohibited the sale and circulation of this book.

Secondary themes of Lazarillo

In addition to the issue of false morality, in this classic text of Spanish literature we also we find other subtopics that are very important for the development of the plot and the evolution of the protagonist:

• Hunger. The presence of hunger is a constant throughout the work. Lazarillo has to fight to survive because he does not have a need as urgent as that of food.
• The religion. The work is considered as a anticlerical text because, in it, the figure of a priest appears who is one of the most cruel and ruthless owners with Lázaro.

Image: Slideshare

Much has been discussed about the author of Lazarillo de Tormes, since this work did not have the signature of any writer, so it was considered anonymous. Many critics and philologists have been investigating the different possible authors of this text which is key in the literature of the Golden Age, but there had never been any convincing evidence Author. Up to now.

And it is that in the month of March 2010, the paleographer Mercedes Agulló determined that the author of Lazarillo de Tormes is Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, a poet and diplomat who belonged to the Andalusian aristocracy of the 16th century. This finding was published by the expert in a book that she titled Around with the author of Lazarillo. Here, all the evidence that Agulló was able to recapitulate is exhaustively analyzed, such as documents and papers, which predict that, it is quite plausible, that the author is Hurtado de Mendoza.

If you want to read more articles similar to El Lazarillo de Tormes - Brief Summary, we recommend that you enter our category of History of Literature.

• Gómez-Moriana, A. (1980). The subversion of ritual discourse: an intertextual reading of Lazarillo de Tormes. Canadian Journal of Hispanic Studies, 133-154.
• Asensio, M. J. (1959). The religious intention of Lazarillo de Tormes and Juan de Valdés. Hispanic Review, 78-102.
• Blecua, A. (Ed.). (2011). The life of Lazarillo de Tormes. Castalia.
• Jaén, D. T. (1968). The moral ambiguity of "Lazarillo de Tormes". Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 130-134.