From Barbara Babcock-Abrahams, A>A Tolerated Margin of Mess=: The Trickster and His Tales Reconsidered,@ Journal of the Folklore Institute, vol. 11, no. 3, 1975: 147-186.

Babcock examines the Winnebago trickster cycle and offers her insight about trickster:

• ~No figure in literature, oral or written, baffles us quite as much as trickster. He is positively identified with creative powers, often bringing such defining features of culture as fire or basic food, and yet he constantly behaves in the most antisocial manner we can imagine. Although we laugh at him for his troubles and his foolishness and are embarrassed by his promiscuity, his creative cleverness amazes us and keeps alive the possibility of transcending the social restrictions we regularly encounter.  

• ~In the majority of his encounters with men, he violates rules or boundaries, thereby necessitating escape and forcing himself to again wander aimlessly.  

• ~The sum total of these nineteen episodes of rejection, reversal, and transformation, of ahistorical, abiological, and asocial acts is a developmental process. This process of increasing biological, psychic, and social awareness to the point where he returns to society and appears as an almost thoroughly socialized individual and, further, to a realization of his role and identity as culture-hero, is similar in structure to the Bildungsroman or developmental novel. Dealing as it does with an individual at odds with society, the seeming antistructure of picaresque narrative implies or assumes this structure or a developmental pattern.

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• ~Trickster is . . . a "creative negation" who introduces death and with it all possibilities to the world. . . . Things "are" by virtue of and in relation to what they "are not": structure implies antistructure and cannot exist without it.  

• ~Trickster, "the foolish one" -- the negation offering possibility -- stands in immediate relation to the center in all its ambiguity . . . . And for this we not only tolerate this "margin of mess," this "enemy of boundaries," we create and re-create him.