UNINTERlingua 2023

49 anonymous author, with a very diffe- rent style, decided to continue the life of this famous pícaro and depicted his extraordinary fantastic adventures in the continuation of 1555. This little-known Segunda parte has been a point of great debate among the literary critics who fo- cus on the Spanish Golden Age period. Many of these critics have often ignored this work because of the fantastic ele- ments that can be found in it. It is my purpose here to demonstrate how fantastic and picaresque elements can co-exist equally within the same work without that work being denied its place within the picaresque genre. While it is true that in the original novel of 1554 almost all of Lázaro’s adven- tures are basically realistic, this fact does not necessarily mean that all the picaresque works that appear after the original one must have the exact same characteristics. If this were the case, the reader would find hundreds of replicas instead of original works throughout the Spanish picaresque. This is why it is not surprising that the author of the Segunda parte placed his Lázaro in different types of adventures in order to achieve entertainment for 49