38 pages • 1 hour read
AnonymousLazarillo De Tormes
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1554A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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Bread and Wine
In Christian traditions bread and wine play a part in the Eucharist. The bread is often representative of the body of Jesus, and the wine of his blood. While the bread and wine of the Eucharist are symbolic aspects of the Catholic faith, in this story bread and wine are also important symbols in Lázaro’s journey as he begins to see the immorality and hypocrisy of the church. As symbols of health and well-being, bread and wine are emblems of poverty and metaphors of wealth. Bread is coveted, and for Lázaro, it is something to have at any cost, even if getting it involves petty theft, trickery, or begging. Once Lázaro begins using devious or desperate schemes to secure sustenance, he never manages to stop, demonstrating how far people will go not only to survive but also to maintain their comfort and security.
Wine is both intoxicating and healing. When the poor drink wine, they forget their troubles. When Lázaro steals the wine from the blind man, he is beaten. But wine is also used to heal his wounds, so wine is something that gets him into trouble and something that rescues him. Later it is wine that changes Lázaro’s life. When he gets the job as town-crier, he makes his money advertising wine. He uses his power to glean favors from the wine sellers because, as he says, “if anybody anywhere in Toledo has wine to sell or anything else, he won’t get very far in his business unless Lázaro de Tormes has his finger in the pie” (58). Wine represents not just wealth but also greed. It becomes a tool to wrest more from Lázaro’s business associates in exchange for advertising its sale.
Horns
Though it is unknown why, at the time of the book’s publication, horns had an important symbolic meaning: When a man was depicted with horns on his head, it meant he had been cheated on by his wife. Horns appear as a foreshadowing symbol when Lázaro is with the blind man. The blind man predicts that Lázaro will be married to an unfaithful woman while he grips the horns stuck to the side of the inn where the mule drivers tie up their animals.
Later, it is clear that Lázaro’s wife is also the archbishop’s mistress. Lázaro remembers the horns that the blind man predicted would one day be on his head and worries that maybe the prediction has come true. But Lázaro, who has been hardened by his experiences with his masters, has learned that it is easier to deny than to accept the truth. In this regard, if horns represent adultery by a woman toward her husband, then they also represent deceit. Lázaro must deceive himself to accept the lucrative offer made by the archbishop, who himself is duplicitous.
It should be noted that in some Christian paintings and stories, the devil is portrayed as a many-horned beast. Horns also appear as a symbol throughout literature, such as in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, in which the devil is depicted as “an old cuckhold, with horns on his head.” (Barrigan Basker, Lisa. The Symbolism of Horns. The Ecphorizer, Issue 23, August. 1983. www.ecphorizer.com/.Accessed 23 Mar. 2021.)
Disenchantment of the Picaro
The book’s main motif is the disenchantment of its main character, Lázaro. The word picaresque, which describes the book’s genre, derives from the word picaro. A picaro is a person much like the narrator, usually a young boy who is cast away and has little to no use in his community. A picaro is or becomes a disenchanted delinquent after going from master to master and disaster to disaster.
A picaro, like Lázaro, usually begins life naïve and must live by his wits. He comes from a low-class environment and is disparaged because of his poverty. Lázaro’s story features all these characteristics. For instance, his first master, the blind man, tells him to put his ear to the rock to hear a loud noise, then smashes Lázaro against the rock. This represents the beginning of the picaro’s journey: Naivete will only bring him pain, and he quickly learns that he will only survive if he develops his wits.
As the story continues, Lázaro repeatedly learns about the hypocrisy of the church and vacuousness of the aristocracy. For instance, he learns that the squire may look good on the outside, but he is of no use to society at large. He isn’t a warrior or an artist. He’s a fake. Lázaro learns that society has contempt for manual and trade labor, and so he learns that one must ignore reality and live in denial if one’s goal is the acquisition of comfort. Taking cues from his many disastrous masters, Lázaro then grows into a product of his environment. In becoming a front for the archbishop’s concubine, he embraces an existence built on facades and hypocrisy, and turns his back on reality so he can live without working and suffering.
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