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Don Quixote
Don Quixote battles the windmills because he believes that they are ferocious giants. He thinks that after defeating them -- all "thirty or forty" of them! -- he will be able to collect the spoils...
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Don Quixote
An apt episode from Don Quixote comes from Don Quixote's showdown with a windmill. The episode consists mostly of absurd violence: after all, Don Quixote's opponent (a windmill) is entirely unable...
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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
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
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
Rocinante is the name Don Quixote gives to his horse. It is a broken-down nag, a hack, but in his distorted imagination he thinks it is a beautiful, noble animal worthy of a valiant knight like...
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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
Like so much with him, Quixote's armor is his own creation. Quixote's armor is of his family name and something that is homemade: "The first thing he did was to clean up some armour that had...
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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 is an excellent satirical example of a chivalric knight because of the way that in so many ways he tries to be a knight but is shown to fail so dismally. Perhaps what is most apparent...
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Don Quixote
You can find the plot summary for Don Quixote right here on eNotes. Here is the link: http://www.enotes.com/topics/don-quixote/summary
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Miguel de Cervantes
The major impact that Cervantes had through his literary work was through the creation of the picaresque novel, which was a novel where the main character was not a chivalric hero but a much more...
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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
The digressionary story-within-a-story that "Ill-Advised Curiosity" represents helps to highlight the major theme of this picaresque novel, which is that of love. For Don Quixote, love is what...
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Don Quixote
I tend to read the theme of this book along rather specific lines: participating in popular fads is equivalent to living in a dream world. The young lovers are inauthentic, just as Don Quixote is...
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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
Well, I don't see how it's possible, when looking at Don Quixote in context of .. well ... the text, to see him as a noble idealist. The dear man was a bit daft. He was obsessed, in his isolation,...
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Don Quixote
I think that there is much truth to the idea that all stories are Quixotic. If we appropriate the ideas out of Cervantes' work in their most basic element, these notions fit all literature....
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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
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 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
The biggest reason why he should not be locked away is that there is something pure and good about his intentions, as misguided and rooted in fantasy as they are. Although he clearly struggles to...
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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
How we view Don Quixote depends a great deal on our attitude toward ideals. Many realists, for example, as the name implies, believe that ideals are interesting but largely not relevant to living...
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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
I don't think that Sancho believed in Quixote's dreams as much as Quixote did, but there is some level of adherence to Quixote's notion of reality. When Quixote sees monsters, Sancho sees them as...
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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
This is of course a compelling question, and forces us to compare the character of Don Quixote with that of Christ. The big problem with this comparison is that Don Quixote is compared unfavourably...
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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
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
[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
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
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
The story's depicted relationship between both of them is one of leader and follower. Quixote as the leader has his trusty Sancho to help him in his endeavors. Sancho is shown to be round and...
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Don Quixote
This is an excellent and very interesting question. As you know, Alonso Quixano (the main character's birth name before changing it himself to Don Quixote de La Mancha) was a retired man, nearing...
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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
When he leaves his comfortable home to set out on his adventures as a knight-errant, Don Quixote dreams of a romantic life of chivalry, one filled with acts of courage as he rights the wrongs in...
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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
Don Quixote is often quite funny, even hilarious in parts, but beneath the humor, the elements of tragedy certainly exist. You might consider these subtopics in writing a paper over the novel as...
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Don Quixote
I think that Quixote can be seen as a comic figure to a great extent because of how he views himself. In the first part of the book, Quixote really sees himself as worthy of a knight's pursuit and...
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Don Quixote
On many levels, Quixote and the book for which he is named can be seen as a tragedy. I think that there are a couple of reasons for this. The first being that Quixote's quest is unrealized in...
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Don Quixote
Don Quixote can certainly not be classified as a pure tragedy or a pure comedy. The protagonist, Don Quixote, is actually an anti-hero, or perhaps a pseudo-hero, which adds a comic element to...
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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
You should be able to get many different responses to this question in contrasting both heroes and their quests. I would say that the primary level of comparison between both is that they both...
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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
The ability to dream is a powerful and almost universal concept. Cervantes' work makes this its central premise or idea and this might be a reason why the work has endured over time. Quixote is a...
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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
In the best sense, Don Quixote believes the best about everyone in his life. As mentioned, a prostitute becomes a lady worth fighting for and a faithful nag becomes a fighting steed. There is, of...
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Don Quixote
Don Quixote's (really Alonso Quijano's) occupation is not named. He is simply a "gentleman" from La Mancha (in the Dedication he is first called "The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of la Mancha")...
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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...
