El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha. New York, 1905.
From the collection of the George Peabody Library
Collection number: 863.32 D6 1605
Cervantes' masterpiece narrates the travel adventures of an old gentleman who thinks he is a knight errant. After going insane from misreading tales of chivalry, he abandons his home to search for adventure on the highways and in the rural landscape of imperial Spain. The first part of the novel takes Don Quixote from his small village in La Mancha to the forests of the Sierra Morena, and then returns him to his village where he recuperates from exhaustion and various and sundry injuries. His encounters with other characters often take place at roadside inns which in his madness he believes to be castles. His goal is to right all manner of wrongs and to gain fame for his valorous deeds. Don Quixote meets a wide variety of characters from peasants to noblemen, from criminals to priests, from prostitutes and insane lovers to wronged women and jealous men.
Two of the principal themes of the first part of the novel are chivalry and its absurd and often comical relationships to "real" life, and love, both courtly and conjugal. Cervantes often uses these encounters between Don Quixote and other characters to satirize the society in which these characters exist and to comment on the various codes of behavior reflected by their actions.
Don Quixote is accompanied on his travels by his neighbor Sancho Panza, an illiterate but shrewd peasant primarily interested in eating and drinking. Sancho's weakness for the material things of life leads him to believe Don Quixote's promise that by following his master he will eventually be rewarded with an island-kingdom of his own. The conflict between art and nature, that is, between Don Quixote's idealized and fictional world on the one hand, and Sancho's natural world of biological existence on the other, points to an incompatible relationship between the two worlds in which nature always seems to gain the upper hand. When Don Quixote is convinced that the windmills he encounters are giants, Sancho rightly insists that they are only windmills.
The second part of the novel is more complex. Don Quixote and Sancho meet many characters who have read the first part of the novel, and thus already know about the pair's previous adventures. Instead of confronting what they believe to be "reality" as they did in the first part of the novel, Don Quixote and Sancho often participate in adventures that are staged by and for the benefit and amusement of the characters themselves. The metaphor of "the world is a stage" becomes literally true. The consequences of this shift are profound. The world is no longer "natural" but instead is "artificial." Often it seems as if the world were more insane than Don Quixote himself. It can be said that Don Quixote gradually regains his sanity by the end of Part II because he is driven to it by the eccentric behavior of those he meets.
The first readers of Cervantes' masterpiece--Spaniards as well as foreigners--viewed the novel as a work of pure entertainment, almost as a comic book or farce. Much of the humor in the novel comes from the contrast between Don Quixote's bookish interpretation of the world and its interaction with Sancho's bodily hungers and functions. Their travels together teach each of them that human experience is made up of both imagination and reality.
But Don Quixote is more than a book
about other books or about fiction and its relationship to reality. Like
Don Quixote, many of the characters who
inhabit the world of the novel are avid readers of fiction. Cervantes
explores their struggles with what is real and what is not, and in so
doing he addresses the readers of his novel as well. The reading of
Don Quixote is intended to be a
"critical reading." Its purpose is
to teach how to read novels, how to discern the differences and
similarities between the fiction and reality of experience itself.
