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Don Quixote
The unique approaches concerning the narratorship and the authorship of the two parts of Don Quixote are mainly a result of the questions raised about the novel’s intriguing narrative technique,...
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Don Quixote
Don Quixote spent much of his time reading romances about the feats of noble knights doing good, and protecting the vulnerable. These highly idealized, unrealistic stories presented the world as...
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Don Quixote
In Don Quixote, the reader interprets Don Quixote himself as a seemingly-insane person for the first part of the story. He believes that he is mirroring honorable knights with his behavior, but...
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Don Quixote
Readers who first encounter Sancho Panza will not admire the man. He is ignorant and rude. It's not that he's a bad person, but he is selfish and mostly interested in fulfilling his own desires. He...
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Don Quixote
During a fight with a barber, Don Quixote steals a bowl from him. He is convinced that the bowl is the magic helmet of Mambrino. In the ensuing melee, Sancho Panza, the Don's faithful retainer,...
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Don Quixote
Don Quixote begins by introducing the main character, Alonso Quehana, who has read so many books about chivalry that "his brains dried up" and he became convinced he was actually a knight. He takes...
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Don Quixote
Any analysis of Don Quixote should examine Cervantes’s motivation for writing what might be considered the first modern novel. By doing so, the reader will better understand why the protagonist,...
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Don Quixote
Two of the characters in Don Quixote who undergo significant changes are the title character and his squire, Sancho Panza. Their changes closely match Miguel de Cervantes’s themes of the importance...
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Don Quixote
Published in two parts in 1605 and 1615, Don Quixote appeared at a time when the printing press (which appeared around 1500) had made reading materials much more common than they'd ever been in...
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Don Quixote
Don Quixote asserts that chivalry and romantic love are the unrealistic ideals of romance novels. They may make entertaining reading in a book but they don't translate into real life. Don Quixote...
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Don Quixote
In writing Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes draws on incidents from his own life, as well as facts about sixteenth-century Spain, to create his characters and develop the novel’s plot. Although the...
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Don Quixote
Idealism is the "ideal" perfect situation. Realism is "reality"--how the world really is.One obvious example of idealism is how Don Quixote believes himself to be a knight. In...
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Don Quixote
Satire is the use of irony or sarcasm to illuminate the flaws of humans and humanity. Don Quixote calls into question the whole idea of chivalry and the actions of knights in general. As Quixote...
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Don Quixote
In terms of how Don Quixote views the world, he exemplifies everything a stereotypical knight should be. He upholds the tenets of chivalry -- courageous, honorable, loyal, and courteous – as fully...
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Don Quixote
This is because of the strain of realism throughout the novel which continually debunks the title character's fantasies and exaggerated love for adventure, which is typical of the older prose form...
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Don Quixote
In chapter one of Don Quixote, Quixote, in order to begin his quest to seek honor and glory as a knight, attempts to repair his great grandfather’s armor. The armor is very old, rust-eaten, and...
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Don Quixote
We are told that all the books of knightly and courtly adventure Don Quixote reads have turned his mind and have, in fact, made him a bit crazy. (Whether or not Quixote truly is insane is one of...
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Don Quixote
Don Quixote is a lovable character. He is a hero in his own mind. His ideas on chivalry are honorable ideas. He is a hopeless romantic who learns the hard way that not everyone is as romantic as he...
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Don Quixote
Don Quixote's household includes his housekeeper and his young niece, Antonia. While they (and others) may attempt to keep him out of trouble, his unusual worldview and peculiar interpretation of...
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Don Quixote
As we might expect, the outcome of this encounter is not one that Don Quixote had bargained for. When the Don sees some prisoners in chains on their way to the ships to be used as galley-slaves,...
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Don Quixote
The final scene of Miguel de Cervantes’ novel, Don Quixote, the hero, now sane, becomes ill, recovers his sanity, and dies. Having recovered his sanity, he renounces the desire for adventure and...
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Don Quixote
The perception of reality is actually the mockery that Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra intended to emphasize in the story of Don Quixote. This is a quite tri-dimensional story, almost magical, which...
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Don Quixote
I think that Quixote was ahead of his time in articulating the need for dreams in the individual subconsciousness. Quixote is driven by the need to be a knight. It is a dream, a pursuit, embedded...
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Don Quixote
In Don Quixote, the reader has no trouble distinguishing what is real from what is unreal. The protagonist, Don Quixote, however, is hopelessly clueless. According to the narrator, he has read too...
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Don Quixote
In the iconic tale, Senor Alonso Quijana may well have been Cervantes's alter ego, given the latter's own love of reading and adventure. Senor Quijana's obsession with the life of chivalry...
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Don Quixote
There are several reasons why Don Quixote abuses Sancho the way he does. The first two are related to each other: humor and entertainment. It is funny, in a broad, slapstick fashion, for Don...
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Don Quixote
It is difficult to say who Cervantes influences were because much of the literature that influenced him was anonymous. He was probably familiar with many of the Medieval legends and tales...
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Don Quixote
The opening scene of Miguel de Cervantes’ novel, Don Quixote, invokes the generic conventions of the mock-epic by replicating traditional epic openings, albeit figured parodically. The prologue...
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Don Quixote
All of the lessons the Don learns about being chivalrous come from books, specifically the fabulous tales of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. The influence of these tales was...
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Don Quixote
Don Quixote tells the story of a character whose mission is to return chivalry to the world. The main character of the book is portrayed as clumsy and delusional and he often fails (comically) in...
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Don Quixote
The main humor in the novel arises from the slippage or gap between Don Quixote's "mad" or not quite sane vision of the world and the down-to-earth reality of what the world is. Don Quixote, an...
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Don Quixote
Quixote is an idealist. Perhaps, he ends up learning the harsh truth of the world, but his defining elements are ones of idealism. He pursues a conception of the good that only exists in his...
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Don Quixote
[eNotes editors are only permitted to answer one question per posting. If you have additional questions, please post them separately.] In Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra's Don Quixote, Sancho Panza...
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Don Quixote
I think that the largest piece of evidence that might help to persuade that Quixote is not insane is that he sincerely believes in his ideals. Quixote represents a force of reality that seeks to...
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Don Quixote
The Golden Age in Spain is the equivalent of the Renaissance in England. It spans, roughly, from the end of the fifteenth to the beginning of the seventeenth centuries and includes great art,...
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Don Quixote
Don Quixote's madness was always indissolubly linked to his faith in the chivalric code. And now that the Don's faith in that code has been shattered forever—despite the best efforts of Sancho...
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Don Quixote
In Cervantes' epic, Don Quixote tries to live by the tenets of "courtly love," a concept that was very popular in his era. David L. Simpson of DePaul University explains courtly love in...
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Don Quixote
Don Quijote de La Mancha is a parody based on historical fiction and stories of chivalry which are very inherent to the 16th century in both Spain and most of Europe. The mockery of historical...
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Don Quixote
The main themes in the novel and primarily in Chapter X are metafiction and metatheater. Metafiction, according to Patricia Waugh, is: fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically...
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Don Quixote
The second question is critical to answering the first one. I think that some level of discussion has to be established on whether Quixote is pretending to be mad in order to avoid a particular...
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Don Quixote
I do think that Don Quixote can be applied to modern culture. The tone is humorous, but the theme is serious. I have always interpreted it as this: You need to be yourself, and go after your...
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Don Quixote
Part I, Chapter 7 says: Just then they came in sight of thirty or forty windmills that rise from that plain. And no sooner did Don Quixote see them that he said to his squire, "Fortune is guiding...
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Don Quixote
It is important to consider what is meant by "true history." This digression is of course not an example of something that actually happened, and is yet another story that is insterted as something...
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Don Quixote
Don Quixote maintains his illusion that he is a knight errant through many adventures and dangerous encounters during his journeys, always managing to keep reality at bay. He suffers hunger, goes...
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Don Quixote
I think that you can find different answers or approaches to this question. I am going to throw my hat in the ring by suggesting that Quixote is not entirely a defender of Christianity. I am not...
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Don Quixote
In his essay, "Cervantes as Narrator of Don Quixote, Howard Mancing states that one critic, Parr, attributes the voice of the narration to what he calls a "dramatized author." On the other hand,...
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Don Quixote
Don Quixote leaves his comfortable home to pursue a great romantic dream. He has lost touch with reality and fallen under the illusion that he is, in fact, a knight-errant of bygone days. His...
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Don Quixote
The character of Don Quixote is complex, but is easily understood by the concepts of Chivalry, which are the direct cause of his insanity and subsequent actions. Don Quixote reads extensively in...
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Don Quixote
This is an interesting notion, but the text does not encourage this interpretation. The essence of the novel is that Quixote, in his deluded state brought on by reading too much Romance...
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Don Quixote
Don Quixote and Alonso Quijana are the same person. Don Quixote started life as Alonso Quijana, and Sancho and his wife were Quijana's loyal servants. Quijana is a typical gentleman of his time and...