Picaresque is a genre of usually satiric prose fiction originating in Spain and depicting in realistic, often humorous detail the adventures of a roguish hero of low social degree living by his or her wits in a corrupt society.
A traditional picaresque is often a "Shaggy Dog" Story and/or has a Random Events Plot. Elements of the picaresque frequently show up in Cyberpunk stories. The plots are often episodic, and there's very little in the vein of a main quest narrative, and as such most picaresque narratives usually have a few stock characters who weave in and weave out.
Examples:
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Film
- All of the Dollars Trilogy, especially The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.
- Forrest Gump, though the novel is much more clearly in the genre than the movie.
- Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. II: Both films contain elements of the genre, especially with the episodic plotlines (either film can be watched without any context from the larger Marvel Cinematic Universe), the roguish protagonists (the Guardians have their own individual charges but as of their inception, they are technically mercenaries) and comedic overtones.
- Little Big Man.
- O Lucky Man!: A deeply cynical film about how humans are craven and selfish, with a protagonist who's buffeted by events, wandering through a Random Events Plot in which he has a series of bizarre adventures. Like blundering into an Army base where he's arrested as a spy, or volunteering to be a subject for a medical experiment only to find that it's a Mad Scientist's lair and the mad scientist is creating freakish pig-men.
- O Brother, Where Art Thou?, about three buffoonish escaped criminals stumbling from adventure to adventure
- The Journey of Natty Gann is about a teenage girl travelling across America during The Great Depression, getting into scrapes and adventures along the way
Literature
- Lazarillo de Tormes is generally considered the first of this genre.
- Don Quixote has some elements of this genre and is seen as picareque by non-Spanish speakers for its episodic plot and its Nested Story sequence. Spanish-speakers feel it's more an inversionnote .
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
- Moll Flanders
- Candide
- A Confederacy of Dunces
- Confessions of Felix Krull
- The Dying Earth series by Jack Vance
- Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe
- The Gentleman Bastard series
- Simplicius Simplicissimus (the English title of Der Abenteuerliche Simplicissimus), one of the earliest true novels in the German language.
- The Unfortunate Traveller: or, the Life of Jack Wilton (1594) by Thomas Nashe.
- Cloud Atlas: Somni describes 'The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish' as such.
- Life of Pi
- Middlesex
- Baudolino
- The Satyricon
- ''Fly by Night'' and ''Fly Trap/Twilight Robbery'' by Frances Hardinge
- The Rincewind books in the Discworld series. Rincewind is basically just a (mostly) selfish coward who travels around trying to survive the weird stuff happening around him.
- The Reivers, in which a roguish stablehand steals his boss's automobile and drives it from small-town Mississippi to Memphis in order to talk a prostitute into marrying him.
- The Good Soldier Ċ vejk: Random Events Plot centered on the certified idiot surviving by Obfuscating Stupidity (or real one — the jury's still out) and tall tales he tells.
- Under the Net
- Quillifer by Walter Jon Williams. The title character is an ambitious Lovable Rogue trying to better himself amidst a civil war while plagued by an angry nymph.
- Clive King's Me And My Million, a children's book; the protagonist is a dyslexic eleven-year old street kid who finds himself lost in London with a stolen painting.
Music
- The Code Geass OST song Picaresque (which could double as an ImageSong for Lelouch) is probably named for this genre, considering the kind of world that Lelouch lives in, and his own way of fighting it.
- The Decemberists' album Picaresque.
Theatre
- Mother Courage and Her Children by Bertolt Brecht, set in the Thirty Years' War, based on Landstörtzerin Courasche, another novel by the author of Simplicissimus.
- Peer Gynt, with occasional Low Fantasy elements.
- Stop the World—I Want to Get Off
Video Games
- Half-Life 2 and its episodes (particularly 2) features a fairly episodic plot as Gordon drives around the eastern European coast, encountering a variety of self-contained side stories and vignettes. Episode 2 in particular features a wider variety of social commentary thanks to its greater cross section of characters of differing social standing.
- Persona 5: High school Japanese Delinquents become Picaresque thieves to Heel Face Brainwash the corrupt, while referencing quite a lot of other Picaresque stories.
- Dragon Age II has elements of this. The protagonist and their family are refugees in the city of Kirkwall, simply trying to make their way in the world for most of the game. Over time, as the main character becomes more important and powerful within the city, a main story arc does emerge from the big world-shaking events you sometimes have to deal with, but the bulk of the story is spent on subplots and side adventures.
- The Procession To Calvary is the story of a Sociopathic Soldier getting into various surreal situations and outsmarting characters in a journey across Crapsack World.
Web Original
- Deeper Up the Tower uses this episodic, chaotic, somewhat whimsical style to tell a story of Florian, a knight wandering through the trippy, magical Tower, having dream-like adventures on the way.
- The Lay of Paul Twister mixes elements of this genre in with High Fantasy and Trapped in Another World.
Western Animation
- The Simpsons has many elements of the picaresque genre: Both Homer and Bart are notorious underperformers who avoid hard work and shirk their duties whenever possible, are generally irresponsible, treat their fellow men shabbily and take refuge to lies when it suits them, all the while being not especially bright. Yet they somehow always manage to avoid all serious consequences of their foolishness or egoism and are likable characters despite their many flaws.