a moralisticfable about the unfortunate consequences of pursuing one's dreams, it is unlikely that he would have ended the novel in such a complicated and self-contradictory way. True, in the concluding scene, Don Quixote is depicted as an exemplar of a penitent, sober "realist" of a sort, who has recognized and repented of his folly. Yet, Cervantes notes approvingly that the fictive version of the "author" of the story of Don Quixote, Cide Hamete, omitted to mention the real name of his hero's village, so as to allow for competition amongst rival villages for the honor of claiming Don Quixote as their native son. In summarizing the demise of his hero, Cervantes remarks,

"Such was the end of the Ingenious Gentleman of La Mancha, whose village Cide Hamete would not indicate precisely, in order to leave all the towns and villages of La Mancha to contend among themselves for the right to adopt him and claim him as a son, as the seven cities of Greece contended for Homer."

If Don Quixote is potentially comparable to Homer in the hearts and minds of the fictive residents of the region of La Mancha, so too is he legendary for Cervantes' readers. Don Quixote is still a figure of heroic stature at the conclusion of the novel. Indeed, with the comparison to Homer, he has, if anything, acquired greater stature within the imaginative universe of the novel. Interestingly, he now appears as an epic poet rather than an epic hero.

At the end of Don Quixote, Quixote dies and says that his chivalric ideals were wrong. He renounces his own knighthood and his idealistic dreams. He no longer believes that he was right.

In some ways, the book is about both Sancho and Quixote coming more toward the middle. They both learn from each other and from their travels that nothing is black and white. What Quixote says is that what he believed is wrong. He goes on to counsel his niece to marry someone who wouldn't be like him. He says,

Item, it is my wish that if Antonia Quixana, my niece, desires to marry, she shall marry a man of whom it shall be first of all ascertained by information taken that he does not know what books of chivalry are; and if it should be proved that he does, and if, in spite of this, my niece insists upon marrying him, and does marry him, then that she shall forfeit the whole of what I have left her, which my executors shall devote to works of charity as they please.

It's clear that Quixote doesn't think that what he did was right. His way of life dies with him, and his madness was simply that—madness. The character is gone and won't continue to have more adventures. The ending shows that his ideas of chivalry were not good and were not something that others should emulate.

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 devotes himself to writing his will and preparing for death. Perhaps the most significant thing about the ending is what it says about the nature of goodness. Don Quixote states “whether I'm a knight errant, as now, or a shepherd, later on, I'll never stop doing for you whatever needs to be done.” In other words, what matters is doing whatever good needs to be done. Because he is a fundamentally good man, he didn’t need the fantastical trappings of chivalry to do good deeds, and in fact, he can do good more effectively if rather than pretend to be a knight, he just, in his own persona, takes care of his friends and lives responsibly. Thus the final critique of chivalry is that it misleads the common man by thinking one needs a horse and armour to do good deeds, where actually the trapping of chivalry will mislead you into tilting at windmills when you should be caring for friends and family.

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 emphasizes for us that one important focus of the novel is on the epic genre itself, and that much of the novel will not just be an entertaining story, but a commentary on such works as the Chanson de Roland. Just as a conventional epic opens with the hero donning armour and mounting a horse, so too does Don Quixote, renaming himself and his horse to move completely into his dream of life as it is lived in the epics. Also, as is traditional of epics, he devotes himself to a mistress and sets out to do good deeds in her name. The reader, of course, is informed of how reality at every turn, differs from what Don Quixote believes, and the constant comparison of reality (e. G. the windmills) against the ideals of epic provide both the comedy of the book and the  more important theme of the unrealistic nature of heroic epic. Thus the significance of the opening lies in its critique of epic conventions.