Enlightened Ideas and Fictional Procedures in Lazarillo de ciegos caminantes

Abstract

Published in the context of the Bourbonic reforms in America, the travel story Lazarillo de ciegos caminantes, by the Spanish writer Alonso Carrió de la Vandera, marks eighteenth-century literature through the conception of an indigenous narrator, Concolorcorvo. This work examines the use of this narrator as a discursive tool of de la Vandera and its formal implications for the work in what concerns the observation of colonial society, intersected by the author’s enlightened perspective. We analyze structural aspects of the book that bring it closer to fiction while, paradoxically, allowing us to glimpse its reformist ideas: the presence of cases that, from the observation of its particularities, gain moral and social significance, and the dialogues between the indigenous narrator and the Spanish visitor, whose proposed game through masks allows him to advance his relentless examination of the ways of life witnessed in the vast territories visited.