The narrator is characterized implicitly for the most part, through the scope and focus of his narrative vision, his selection of evidence, and his tone and stylistic choices. As Patricio Lizama Améstica notes, «el narrador tiene una completa visión de la historia que cuenta» (78 and see his n. 9) and his appreciative account of Tomás's studies and travels, though slight and elliptic, reflects his own values. El Saffar notes the «general favor» and «sympathy» with which the narrator views Tomás, but she judges the narrator insignificant in the development of the story (5253) and even faults him for making «it appear that Tomás is both reasonable and admirable» (55). As for the narrator's treatment of Vidriera, Lizama comments: «lo abandona. Lo deja solo...y se limita a registrar y reproducir lo que dice» (80). The narrator reaffirms a modest measure of support for Rueda, rendering sympathetically in direct address the rejected lawyer's valedictory. On the narrator's admiration of Rodaja and withdrawal of support from Vidriera, see also Russell 247. (N. from the A.)

Avalle-Arce suggests that Cervantes may have drawn Vidriera's sayings from «alguna enciclopedia temática de la época» (Novelas 22; see also Aylward 200). If that is the case, our esteemed manco in composing «El licenciado Vidriera» acted in a way consistent with the advice of that friend («gracioso y bien entendido») who in the Prologue to Part I of Don Quixote advised the writing-blocked author of that document to «buscar un libro» and copy from it everything necessary and useful, «desde la A hasta la Z». The theft may go unnoticed, the friend comments, and «quizá alguno habrá tan simple que crea que de todos os habéis aprovechado en la simple y sencilla historia vuestra...». The friend and Vidriera and Cervantes teach, each in his own way, that witty formulations of accepted notions can pass for wisdom and that social authority adheres to bits and pieces of commonplace lore whenever and from wherever they are borrowed. (N. from the A.)

Indicators of the editor's minimalism include the frequent use of impersonal scenic crutches such as «preguntóle uno», «otro le preguntó», «otra vez le preguntaron», and variants, and reliance on the vaguest time markers: «un día», «otro día», «otra vez», «cuando esto decía», «pasó acaso una vez», and others. «El tiempo y el espacio realmente no existen en este segmento» (Russell 247). (N. from the A.)

My reader may object that at least a few of Vidriera's saying appear to be appropriately discriminating and acceptable to modern tastes, or to the tastes we conjecture were Cervantes' own, or else are timeless. Of this kind are Vidriera's defenses of hard-working actors (66) and autores (67), and escribanos (6970), and religiosos, including a very fat one (71) and all the sainted ones (72). Aylward accepts these at face value (194), but each of these instances is invaded by irony so energetic that it displaces the apparent sense and makes room for its opposite.

Vidriera is a fool, not a teacher, and with a fool's licence he can say in public what others think and feel in private and hold within themselves «under pressure», the volatile gasses of hate, prejudice, superstition, resentment, and floating anxiety, barely contained by their superiors' authority. The fool is a useful escape valve and is appointed and maintained by the prince to be just that. Madly but inconsequentially he sprays out venom against targets of opportunity, both representative profiles isolated for a moment in the shifting crowd and other abstract categories of beings represented ridiculously in absentia. Vidiera is -in a manner of speaking- an autoloading and repeating loose cannon provisioned with an inexhaustible supply of powder, balls, and fodder. It ought to be noted, however, that while he appears to shoot willy-nilly in all directions, he does not aim at princes and bishops and he lands only glancing blows on the powerful. «[Cervantes] ne s'attaque à la noblesse qu'indirectement» (Redondo 41). (N. from the A.)

An unreliable narrator, according to Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan (whose discussion is exemplary in its lucid efficiency), «is one whose rendering of the story and/or commentary on it the reader has reasons to suspect» (100). (N. from the A.)

María A. Cruz Cámara comments that «quien nos comunica la fama del personaje [Rueda] es alguien [el narrador] que no le ha ayudado en absoluto a lograr este objetivo» (21). She adds with comparable discernment that «el narrador le está negando a su personaje la fama que el mismo le atribuye, pues fama sin nombre no es fama», and furthermore «le está adjudicando una fama que el personaje no desea». Concerning Tomás's intriguing and mysterious account of his origins, Lizama Améstica observes: «Como el protagonista se niega a señalar su origen, el narratario espera que quien cuenta la novela entregue algún indicio. Sin embargo, el narrador no dice nada, no agrega información» (76). (N. from the A.)

Forcione touches tentatively and without conviction on a key part of this matter of reliability when he «senses that a reader's exclusion from the participating audience... may in fact be an effect that Cervantes carefully attempted to achieve». He adds: «I would suggest that the author knew quite well that his character was not speaking with his own authentic voice and that Cervantes was in fact presenting in his fool what he considered a diseased form of humor, a heartless humor» (269, italics added). The emphatic expansion and documentation of this reasonable claim, distinguishing Vidriera's words from the narrator's work, and the latter from the author's work, and further distinguishing Vidriera's audience (the crowd) from the narrator's (his readers), and the latter from the author's (which is us), is my undertaking here and in the companion study mentioned in a previous note. (N. from the A.)

As he was controlled by the prince, so he was, Francisco J. Sánchez observes, an instrument of control for the prince; Vidriera is a public spectacle performing daily «mediado por el gusto y el poder señoriales» (138). This prince is a regent of a social system in crisis, intent on blocking challenges to its installed authority by those upwardly mobile who are motivated and empowered by values that Tomás incarnates: social ambition, hard work, education, the search for fair ways to live among others in a law-abiding society. Vidriera -the emasculated Tomás become a laughing stock- is useful for discrediting Rodaja's project, for quieting doubts and discouraging dialog and for appeasing the crowd's embittered uneasiness. García Gallarín takes note of this (especially at 48) in a brief but illuminating article. (N. from the A.)

Cervantes very likely would call Tomás's recovery not a milagro but a misterio, a rare but not impossible occurrence. On this distinction and Cervantes' reliance on providential enablement rather than supernatural intervention, see John J. Allen. Tomás's clear awareness at the moment of anagnorisis that his test and his recovery were providentially designed means that we need not consider «El licenciado Vidriera» an exception to Allen's lucidly argued claim that Cervantes' fictions, romances and novels alike, are set in «one world, governed by a beneficent Providence» (191, Allen's emphasis; and see 19495). Among the commentators mentioned in my note 5, Forcione alone notes the climactic instrumental role of the Hieronymite as a wise, charitable healer in the Erasmian mold (307, 313). (N. from the A.)

Closest to comparability with Tomás in this respect are two of Cervantes' exemplary heroines, Preciosa («La gitanilla») and Isabela («La española inglesa»), who coincidentally are the characters who also most resemble Tomás in mind and heart. They are his soul mates in the Novelas ejemplares. In strong contrast to mine is Rosales's understanding of Tomás's character: «Tomás Rueda no se vincula a nada. Tomás Rueda no comprende el amor. Tomás Rueda no comprende la amistad» (205). Cesare Segre notes the generous economic support extended to needy and deserving Tomás by his companions and friends (56). (N. from the A.)