Newelesu is the trickster of Kaluli oral tradition, the central figure of a long cycle of comic tales told by men after dark in the longhouse. A skilled raconteur draws out his exploits with improvised dialogue, assumed voices, and vocal sound effects, and the episodes turn on Newelesu's appetite, deceit, and the reversals his own schemes bring upon him. He belongs to the register of entertainment and moral instruction rather than to ritual, and Kaluli storytellers treat him as a bounded comic character whose misadventures illuminate proper conduct by inverting it. Because the cycle is improvised and never fixed, its episodes vary from teller to teller.