Picaresque is a satirical novel of episodic adventures featuring a low-born rogue navigating a corrupt society.
The picaresque novel emerged in 16th-century Spain with the anonymous 'Lazarillo de Tormes' (1554), whose orphan narrator survives by his wits while serving cruel and hypocritical masters. The form gave fiction a new tool: a worldview seen from below, where institutions are ridiculous and survival is moral compromise. Cervantes's 'Don Quixote' (1605) absorbed and transformed it; Defoe's 'Moll Flanders' (1722) carried it to England; Mark Twain's 'Huckleberry Finn' (1884) reinvented it on the Mississippi. The picaresque is loose by design — episodes can be added, dropped, or reordered — and its hero learns nothing in the bourgeois sense, because the world he travels is unreformable. Its true descendants today are road movies and shows like 'Better Call Saul'.