Don Quixote

In a village of La Mancha, the name of which I have no desire to call to mind, there lived not long since one of those gentlemen that keep a lance in the lance-rack, an old buckler, a lean hack, and a greyhound for coursing… So begins the novel that many writers consider the greatest ever written.

A poor country gentleman of about fifty, Alonso Quijano, reads so many romances of chivalry — stories of knights-errant, enchanters, giants and damsels — that “his brain dried up” and he lost his wits. He decides to become a knight-errant himself, renames himself Don Quixote de la Mancha, renames his bony nag Rocinante, chooses a peasant girl he once glimpsed as his lady, Dulcinea del Toboso, and rides out into the dusty, ordinary Spain of the early seventeenth century to right wrongs. On his second outing he takes a squire: a fat, illiterate, shrewd and earthy peasant, Sancho Panza, riding a donkey, lured by the promise of governing an island.

What follows — over two parts and a thousand pages — is a series of comic misadventures that grows into something much larger: the friendship of two very different men, a meditation on reality and illusion, a satire on books and readers, a portrait of Spanish society high and low, and finally a tragedy of disillusion.

Background

Cervantes published Part One in 1605 and Part Two in 1615, a year before his death. See Miguel de Cervantes. His announced target was the chivalric romance, wildly popular in sixteenth-century Spain — above all Amadís de Gaula (1508) and its many sequels, full of invincible knights, magic, and impossible adventures — which moralists denounced as corrupting. In the novel’s most famous scene of literary criticism (Part One, chapter 6), the priest and the barber purge Don Quixote’s library, burning most romances but saving a few, including Amadís and the Valencian Tirant lo Blanc.

Synopsis

The first sally and the inn

Having cleaned his great-grandfather’s armour and made a visor from pasteboard, Don Quixote rides out alone one July morning. He arrives at an inn, which he takes for a castle; the two prostitutes at the door are noble ladies; the innkeeper, a former rogue, plays along. Don Quixote keeps vigil over his armour in the yard, attacks two mule-drivers who move it, and is “knighted” by the innkeeper in a mock ceremony. On his way home he tries to rescue a boy being flogged by his master — who, as soon as the knight leaves, flogs the boy twice as hard. He challenges a band of merchants to swear that Dulcinea is the most beautiful woman in the world without having seen her; a muleteer beats him with his own lance. A neighbour finds him and brings him home on a donkey.

The village priest and barber, his friends, wall up his library, telling him an enchanter carried it off.

Sancho, the windmills, and the adventures of the road

Don Quixote persuades a poor neighbour, Sancho Panza, to be his squire, promising him an island to govern. They ride out secretly at night.

On the plain of Montiel they see thirty or forty windmills. “Fortune is guiding our affairs better than we could have wished,” says Don Quixote, “for there, friend Sancho, you see thirty or more monstrous giants, with whom I intend to do battle and take all their lives.” “What giants?” asks Sancho. “Look, your worship, those things over there aren’t giants, they’re windmills, and what seem to be arms are the sails.” Don Quixote charges, spears a sail, and is hurled across the field by the turning wheel. Sancho rushes to him. Don Quixote explains: the enchanter Frestón has turned the giants into windmills to rob him of the glory.

The pattern is set. Don Quixote attacks two Benedictine friars, thinking them enchanters abducting a princess, and fights a ferocious duel with a Basque squire. He tells a group of goatherds a beautiful speech on the Golden Age, when there was no “mine” and “yours”. He is beaten by Galician carriers for Rocinante’s amorous advances to their mares. At another inn — again a castle — he spends a night of chaos and mistaken bedrooms with the servant girl Maritornes; Sancho is tossed in a blanket by the guests because his master refused to pay.

He charges two flocks of sheep, taking them for two great armies, naming their knights and kings, and kills several before the shepherds stone him, knocking out his teeth. Sancho names him “the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance”. He wins from a barber a brass shaving basin, which he insists is the enchanted golden helmet of Mambrino; Sancho, diplomatically, calls it a “basin-helmet” (baciyelmo).

He frees a chain of galley slaves being led to the king’s ships, on the principle that knights must succour the oppressed. The slaves, led by the picaresque writer Ginés de Pasamonte, stone him and steal Sancho’s coat.

The Sierra Morena

In the mountains of the Sierra Morena, imitating the knight Amadís who did penance for his lady, Don Quixote strips to his shirt and turns somersaults, and sends Sancho with a letter to Dulcinea. Here the novel opens out into a web of interwoven love stories — the betrayed lover Cardenio, gone mad in the mountains; the beautiful Dorotea, seduced and abandoned by Don Fernando; a novella, The Curious Impertinent, read aloud at the inn, about a husband who destroys his marriage by testing his wife’s fidelity; a captive’s tale of escape from Algiers (drawing on Cervantes’s own captivity). The priest, the barber and Dorotea (playing a princess, Micomicona, whose kingdom has been usurped by a giant) lure Don Quixote back home. At the inn, he fights a battle in his sleep with the giant and slashes wineskins, spilling red wine he takes for blood. Finally they lock him in a cage on an ox-cart, telling him he is enchanted, and bring him home. There he falls ill.

Part Two: the famous knight

Ten years separate the two parts in publication, but only a month in the story. In Part Two, something extraordinary has happened: Part One has been published, and everyone has read it. The bachelor Sansón Carrasco, a clever student, tells them they are famous; people they meet recognize them from the book and play along with their delusions — or play cruel tricks on them. Even the spurious sequel by “Avellaneda” is known within the story, and Don Quixote changes his route to Barcelona to prove the impostor a liar.

The knight and squire set out a third time, to Toboso to see Dulcinea. Sancho, who never delivered the letter, has to produce her; he picks the first peasant girl they meet, riding a donkey, and declares her Dulcinea. Don Quixote sees only a coarse peasant with garlic breath, and concludes that enchanters have transformed his lady. The trickster has become the trickster of his master; and from now on, Don Quixote’s mission is haunted by the enchantment of Dulcinea.

He fights and defeats the Knight of the Mirrors — Sansón Carrasco in disguise, who planned to defeat him and order him home. He challenges a caged lion, which yawns and turns its back. He attends the wedding of Camacho the rich, foiled by the poor lover Basilio’s trick. He descends into the Cave of Montesinos and returns with a dream-vision of enchanted knights and Dulcinea begging a loan of six reales — which even he half-doubts. He watches a puppet show of a Moorish rescue and, forgetting it is a play, smashes the Moorish puppets with his sword.

The Duke and Duchess

The longest episode of Part Two takes place at the palace of a Duke and Duchess, wealthy aristocrats who have read Part One and stage elaborate, cruel entertainments to make fun of the knight and squire. They convince Don Quixote that he must ride the magic wooden horse Clavileño through the heavens, blindfolded, while servants blow bellows and hold burning tow under their noses. They tell Sancho that to disenchant Dulcinea he must give himself 3,300 lashes. And they grant Sancho his wish: they make him governor of the “island” of Barataria (a village).

To everyone’s surprise, Sancho governs wisely. Before he leaves, Don Quixote gives him advice worthy of a moralist: “Know thyself… never be guided by arbitrary law… let the tears of the poor find more compassion in you, but not more justice, than the pleadings of the rich.” Sancho judges cases with Solomonic common sense. But after ten days, a staged night attack and a doctor who forbids him every food, he resigns: “Make way, gentlemen, and let me return to my former freedom… I was not born to be a governor.” He goes back to his donkey, embracing it with tears.

Meanwhile Don Quixote endures the Duchess’s servant Altisidora’s mock lovesickness and a sack of cats loosed in his room. The Duke and Duchess’s cruelty has troubled readers ever since: by the end, the deluded knight seems nobler than the sane aristocrats who mock him.

Barcelona and the defeat

They leave and travel to Barcelona, where they meet the noble bandit Roque Guinart and are entertained by a gentleman who shows them a talking head and the printing house where the spurious sequel is being printed. On the beach at Barcelona, the Knight of the White Moon challenges Don Quixote. It is again Sansón Carrasco. He defeats Don Quixote, lances him to the ground, and demands that he confess his opponent’s lady more beautiful than Dulcinea. Don Quixote, from the ground: “Dulcinea del Toboso is the most beautiful woman in the world, and I the most unfortunate knight on earth; it is not right that my weakness should defraud this truth. Drive home your lance, knight.” Carrasco spares him, but holds him to the terms of the duel: he must go home and give up knight-errantry for a year.

The return and the death

Defeated, Don Quixote rides home, dreaming of becoming a shepherd in a pastoral poem with Sancho. Sancho, finally and comically, administers his lashes for Dulcinea’s disenchantment — to the trees.

At home, Don Quixote falls ill with a fever. After a long sleep he wakes and declares that his mind is clear: “I was mad, and now I am sane: I was Don Quixote de la Mancha, and now I am, as I said, Alonso Quijano the Good.” He renounces the books of chivalry. Sancho weeps and begs him not to die: “Don’t die, master… get up and let’s go to the fields dressed as shepherds… perhaps behind some bush we’ll find the lady Doña Dulcinea disenchanted.” Don Quixote makes his will — leaving Sancho money, and asking forgiveness for having made him seem as mad as himself — and dies peacefully, among his friends. Cide Hamete Benengeli lays down his pen: “For me alone was Don Quixote born, and I for him.”

Characters

• Don Quixote (Alonso Quijano) — about fifty, gaunt, courteous, eloquent, learned, brave, utterly sincere, mad only on the subject of chivalry; wise on almost everything else.
• Sancho Panza — short, fat, illiterate, greedy for food and gain, endlessly quoting proverbs; shrewd, loyal, kind, and increasingly wise.
• Rocinante — the bony horse; Dapple (el rucio) — Sancho’s beloved donkey.
• Dulcinea del Toboso — the lady of his dreams, really a peasant girl, Aldonza Lorenzo, who never appears.
• The priest and the barber — his friends, who try to bring him home.
• Sansón Carrasco — the bachelor who disguises himself as two knights to defeat him.
• The Duke and Duchess — aristocratic readers who make a sport of his madness.
• Cide Hamete Benengeli — the fictional Arab historian whose manuscript the narrator claims to be translating.

Themes

Madness and idealism

Don Quixote is mad — but his madness is a form of idealism: he tries to live by a code of honour, courtesy, chastity, justice and service to the weak in a world of mule-drivers, innkeepers and cynical aristocrats. Is he a fool to be laughed at, or a saint of the impossible? Early readers laughed; the Romantics (the Schlegels, Heine, Turgenev) wept; Fyodor Dostoevsky called it “the saddest book ever written” and modelled the Christ-like Prince Myshkin of The Idiot partly on him. See The Absurd.

Reality and perspective

Windmills or giants? Inns or castles? A basin or a helmet? The novel constantly sets two perceptions against each other — the knight’s and the world’s — and sometimes lets the reader doubt which is right. Sancho’s “basin-helmet” (baciyelmo) is a comic emblem of perspectivism, centuries before Friedrich Nietzsche.

Books and life

Don Quixote is the first great novel about the power of fiction over life: a man who becomes what he reads. And in Part Two, it becomes a novel about itself — characters have read Part One; the book’s own fame changes the story. This self-consciousness — fiction reflecting on fiction — makes it the ancestor of the modern and postmodern novel, from Sterne’s Tristram Shandy to Borges and Calvino.

Don Quixote and Sancho

The heart of the book is a friendship between opposites: the idealist and the realist, the dreamer and the eater, the knight who sees enchantments and the squire who sees windmills — and who, over a thousand pages, influence each other. The Spanish critic Salvador de Madariaga called it the “quixotification of Sancho and the sanchification of Don Quixote”: Sancho comes to half-believe, governs wisely, and begs his master to go on dreaming; Don Quixote comes home and accepts reality — and dies.

Freedom and justice

Don Quixote frees the galley slaves on principle (and is stoned for it); Sancho chooses freedom over governorship; the Golden Age speech imagines a world without property. Cervantes, who spent five years as a slave, gave his knight a passion for liberty: “Freedom, Sancho, is one of the most precious gifts heaven has bestowed upon men.”

Cruelty and laughter

Nabokov, lecturing on the novel at Harvard in 1952, was struck by its cruelty: the knight is beaten, mocked and humiliated again and again, and readers laugh. The Duke and Duchess episode makes the reader complicit — we too have read Part One for amusement. The novel’s comedy and its compassion are inseparable.

Form

The novel mixes everything: burlesque, pastoral, picaresque, sentimental novellas, literary criticism, pastiche of chivalric style, proverbs, speeches. Its narrative frame — a narrator who claims to be translating an Arabic manuscript, with gaps and contradictions — makes the act of storytelling itself a subject. Its two parts differ: Part One is episodic, full of interpolated stories; Part Two is more unified, introspective and melancholy.

Interpretations

• Comic (seventeenth and eighteenth centuries): a hilarious satire on romances; Fielding called himself an imitator of Cervantes.
• Romantic (Schlegel, Schelling, Heine, Turgenev): a tragic hero of the ideal crushed by prosaic reality. Ivan Turgenev‘s essay “Hamlet and Don Quixote” (1860) set him against Hamlet as the man of faith and self-sacrifice against the man of self-analysis and doubt.
• Philosophical: Miguel de Unamuno’s The Life of Don Quixote and Sancho (1905) made him a Christ-like hero of faith against reason; José Ortega y Gasset’s Meditations on Quixote (1914) began his philosophy of perspectivism (“I am I and my circumstance”); Michel Foucault (The Order of Things, 1966) read him as the man who still reads the world as resemblances, at the moment words and things come apart.
• Political: a critique of Spain’s imperial decline, its aristocracy, and its obsession with honour and purity of blood.

Legacy

“Quixotic”, “tilting at windmills”, Rocinante and Dulcinea entered many languages. Illustrated by Doré and Daumier, painted by Picasso, set to music by Richard Strauss (Don Quixote, 1897) and Ravel, made into the musical Man of La Mancha (1965, “The Impossible Dream”), Terry Gilliam’s long-cursed film The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (2018), and Kafka’s parable “The Truth about Sancho Panza”, in which Sancho invents Don Quixote to divert his own demons.

Lines to carry

• “In a village of La Mancha, the name of which I have no desire to call to mind…” (I.1)
• “Look, your worship, those things over there aren’t giants, they’re windmills.” (I.8)
• “Freedom, Sancho, is one of the most precious gifts heaven has bestowed upon men.” (II.58)
• “I was mad, and now I am sane.” (II.74)
• “For me alone was Don Quixote born, and I for him.” (II.74)

Keywords

Knight-errant

A wandering knight seeking adventures to right wrongs — the ideal of the chivalric romances.

Quixotic

Exceedingly idealistic, unrealistic, impractical.

Tilting at windmills

Attacking imaginary enemies.

Baciyelmo

Sancho's "basin-helmet" — the emblem of two perspectives at once.

Cide Hamete Benengeli

The fictional Arab historian whose chronicle the narrator "translates".

Barataria

The "island" Sancho governs — from barato, cheap.

Using Don Quixote in conversation

• On idealism: tilting at windmills — noble or foolish?
• On perspective: giants or windmills, helmet or basin.
• On fiction shaping life: a man who became what he read.
• On friendship: the idealist and the realist who change each other.