Don Quixote

Don Quixote by Miguel De Cervantes is a very interesting book. This book is divided into two major parts, and the first part of this book is consisted of fifty two chapters. Don Quixote is the mother of all novels. Or as Lionel Trilling put it, "All prose fiction is a variation on the theme of Don Quixote." That theme is the clash between what we think, or imagine, or wish is so, and what is so. The clash is a matter of differing perspectives: personal, intellectual, class, cultural, historical (Williamson, 13-25). The consciousness of perspective that I see things this way and you see things that way is a form of self-consciousness. It develops in the riper stages of a civilization, if it ever develops. Don Quixote is one marker of that development in ours. Perspective consciousness is an advance in humanisation, a deeper awareness of who we are and how we differ in our understandings. Don Quixote sees a lot of wicked giants, Sancho Panza sees windmills (Cervantes, 66-71). A mild man otherwise, but pugnacious when an "adventure" presents itself, the knight charges. Horse and rider are swept up by a whirling van and tumbled to the ground, ignominiously, ridiculously. Sancho is proven right (Cervantes, 66-71). But the Don is immovable in his chivalric madness: Freston the enchanter turned the giants into mills so as to rob him of the glory of defeating them.

Characters in Part One

In Part One, Don Quixote is a poet who transfigures the persons and things of an inert reality himself first of all, then mills, whores, sheep, inns, convicts, a barber's basin, a kitchen maid, a young woman in distress, a wine skin, etc., etc. into the creatures and objects of a vivid world of marvels. Many of the Don's adventures are straight farce: as when Maritornes, the greasy Joan of a shabby inn, fumbling to find her muleteer lover among those sleeping in the inn loft, stumbles into the knight's arms. (Predmore, 15-27)

The influence of secondary characters upon Don Quixote is like a black shadow. Cervantes's purpose as he states it more than once was to mock "the false and nonsensical" books of chivalry that drew on the Carolingian and Arthurian legends. The simple read these books as history, and Don Quixote in the simplicity of his madness does the same. After a peasant carries home the battered hidalgo ignobly on a mule from his first, brief sally, the village priest and barber conduct an Inquisitional auto-da-fe of the corrupting romances in Quixote's library, sparing however the sensible ones in which knights eat, and sleep, and die in their beds and make a will before they die. That is how Don Quixote dies at last, sensibly, having lived one absurd adventure after another. (Parr, 33-49)

Yet the preposterous romances had one good thing about them they provided "a broad and spacious field" in which an author's pen is able to write unhindered about every kind of happening, person, and subject: shipwrecks and ...