ABSTRACT
In the nineteenth century popular myth defined the United States as a Promised Land with unparalleled opportunities for getting ahead. The twentieth century has witnessed self-conscious imitations of the early picaresque, the liber vagatorum and criminal biography traditions. Moll Flanders’s success breaks the circle of poverty and failure by redefining the nature of criminality itself. Pablos, however, discovers that the Promised Land offers only promises. Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man features a narrating hero who is so ‘outside’ that he is ‘invisible’. Invisible Man is picaresque because it is the autobiography of a failed and rejected outsider. In the seventeenth century the New World symbolized an escape from the hierarchical society of Spain. Seville was populated with indianos, Spaniards who had returned home after making their fortunes in America. Sebastian Dangerfield is an outsider not because he is a poor man attempting to get by in a hostile society but because of the nature of his ‘personality’.
