The wisdom of eccentric old men: a study of type and secondary character in Galdos's social novels, 1870-1897

The wise fool, the sensible madman, and the village idiot, traditional characters in European literature, are best-known through Don Quixote.

Benito Perez Galdos (1843-1920), Spain's most important novelist after Cervantes, contributed to this corpus with a number of principal characters whose affinity to Cervantes's hero is clearly recognizable.

In "The Wisdom of Eccentric Old Men" Peter Bly demonstrates that a number of Galdos's secondary characters - the eccentric old men who appear with regular frequency in the realist social novels of his most important period of writing, 1876 to 1897 - can be classified as a variant or sub-group of this type.;Bly's principal revelation is that Galdos deliberately and consistently used this secondary type to emphasize the significance of the major plot developments and to underline the strengths or weaknesses of principal characters.

In filling these roles the eccentric old men develop from comic shallow types into more complex secondary characters, men of insight and wisdom, who occupy a pivotal position in the novels.