Native American stories often feature a character called the trickster, a comic figure who has both mortal weaknesses and supernatural powers. Recently, the term "trickster" has also appeared in criticism of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European literature, particularly in reference to the picaresque novel and its central character, the picaro (Spanish for "rogue"): both the picaro and the trickster are heroes of episodic adventures, and both live on the peripheries of society and are morally flawed.

Yet closer examination reveals that applying the term "trickster" to both characters obscures essential differences between them. The picaro—typically a male character—operates primarily as an agent of satire. Most commonly, the picaro's adventures begin when he spontaneously yields to his own roguish, though innocent, impulses. The picaro indulges in vices and follies with relish and freedom, much to the outrage of other members of society, who often secretly indulge in similar pastimes out of a habitual compulsion. Thus the picaro's authenticity serves as a foil to the perceived hypocrisy of conventional society. To such a society, the picaro can represent a dangerous, disruptive freedom, and it reacts by marginalizing him. It is in that distance—between the ostensibly disreputable freedom of the picaro and the hypocrisy of the safely ensconced social being—that the satire occurs.

But the trickster, usually an animal acting as a human agent, does not serve a satiric function. For while the picaresque novel takes place in and satirizes human society, the trickster operates in the ahistorical world of myth; where the targets of the picaresque novel are the idiosyncrasies and inconsistencies of a historical human society, trickster stories seek, using the trickster's negative example, to instruct listeners about moral behavior of individuals. In fact, whatever flaws the trickster reveals are thoroughly the trickster's own. They are not a foil to a corrupt society; they are instead essential to who the trickster is. The trickster is a comic figure precisely because of these somewhat irrational, compulsive, and foolish—in short, mortal—actions. Similarly, the trickster is a socially peripheral character not by being forced to the periphery by a hypocritical society, but rather because the trickster's thoroughly flawed character makes the trickster fundamentally antisocial, even anarchic, all the while helping listeners to avoid these flaws.

It is this combination of mythic setting and mortal weakness that determines the particular targets of the trickster's comic high jinks: the eternal and unchanging foibles of mortal beings. In one story, for example, a coyote trickster falls in love with a star. The trickster is quite tenacious and human, even though the object of desire is beyond reasonable mortal possibility. In the end the star takes the trickster up into the sky, only to let the trickster fall back to Earth; the story's listeners realize that the trickster has gotten a comeuppance for reaching beyond proper limits, but all the while they recognize in themselves the trickster's extravagant hopes.