the beggar and other characters in hisExemplary Novels. In Don Quixote, it appears when Don Quixote tries to free a chain gang of galley slaves, all criminals, who then turn on him and rob him. The most sharply delineated rogue is Ginés de Pasamonte, who appears twice in the novel.

The absorbing concern of Don Quixote, however, is the interplay between the delusions of Don Quixote and reality. This theme probably reflects an inner conflict within Cervantes himself, considering his youthful regard for the idealism of the chivalric, then for the pastoral romance, and considering his belief in the need for charm and imagination in poetry, tempered by his developing regard for artistic truth.

This dichotomy is dramatized by the play between Don Quixote, a well-read, highly imaginative but deluded individual, and Sancho Panza, an illiterate peasant with a store of common sense and folk wisdom but with little or no imagination or vision. At the beginning, the line of demarcation is clear-cut, but as the story progresses, the line becomes more and more blurred. There are times when the grand delusions of Don Quixote are so powerful that even Sancho has his doubts; in one instance, Quixote accepts the delusion that Dulcinea is enchanted. Sancho has his own illusions—that he will become the governor of an island and wealthy. At times, the roles are reversed, as when Sancho tries to deceive Quixote into believing that three peasant girls are princesses riding palfreys, and Quixote corrects him: “They are donkeys.”

There are other distortions of reality for Sancho, as when he and Quixote encounter a carter with two docile lions in a cage, and Sancho, exaggerating their size and ferocity, flees. There are times when other people, sensible persons, also distort the truth: biased parents boast of their children, their lovers, their beloved. Persons, such as the innkeeper’s daughter who has illusions of bruises after dreaming that she has fallen from a tower, can be deluded by dreams. There is a difference, however, between their illusions and Quixote’s, the difference between a transforming faith and absurd conclusions.

At the end of Don Quixote, sadly, Don Quixote no longer believes in his delusions, in his visions, and again he becomes Alonso Quijano. Yet even then, the skeptic Sancho Panza will protest: “Who knows but behind some bush we may come upon the lady Dulcinea, as disenchanted as you can wish.”

Don Quixote de la Mancha, Part 1

First published: El ingenioso hidalgo don Quixote de la Mancha, 1605 (English translation, 1612)

Type of work: Novel

A certain Alonso Quijano fancies himself a modern knight-errant righting every manner of wrong and takes the name of Don Quixote.

Don Quixote is a parody of the romance of chivalry, as Aubrey F. G. Bell has described it, “a multiplicity of heterogeneous thoughts, events, episodes, scenes, and characters” welded together in a harmonious whole and bound together by “humor and the consistency of two chief characters,” Alonso Quijano of the village of La Mancha and an illiterate peasant whom he recruits as his squire.

Quijano, or Don Quixote, as he renames himself, is close to fifty, lean and gaunt, and has spent most of his time reading books of chivalry, selling many acres of his land to buy more of these books. Finally, his wits weakened, he decides to put into practice all that he has read. He polishes old pieces of armor and doctors a piece of a helmet with cardboard reinforced with iron strips, and he sets out to find someone to dub him a knight. The innkeeper at a nearby inn humors him. Alarmed at his absence, his niece finds him and brings him back to his village, where she and the curate decide to burn Quixote’s library of more than one hundred books.

Quixote chooses as his lady a good-looking farm girl who lives nearby, Aldonza Lorenzo, whom he renames Dulcinea. Since a squire is necessary, Quixote persuades a neighboring farmer, Sancho Panza, to follow him, with promises of adventure and the prospect of winning an island, over which Sancho is to become governor. Embarked upon his second sally, they find windmills, which Quixote imagines to be giants. Despite Sancho’s warnings, Quixote charges them and is unhorsed by one of the wings. Now seeing that these are really windmills, Quixote explains them as the work of a magician who has changed what are truly giants into windmills. There follow a series of episodes, many of them derived from folklore, in which Quixote suffers setbacks. Two flocks of sheep are imagined to be a Christian army fighting a pagan army—the bleating of the sheep mistaken for the neighing of horses, the sound of trumpets, and the roll of drums.

They meet a man on horseback with something on his helmet that gleams like gold. Quixote is convinced that it is the gold helmet of Mambrino, a famous enchanted helmet of folklore. Bearing down upon the horseman, who is a barber traveling from one village to another to perform some bloodletting for one man and to trim the beard of another, Quixote dismounts and puts to flight the barber, who abandons his headgear, which is actually a basin atop his head to protect it from the rain. Quixote picks it up and proceeds to wear it on his own head.

When Quixote and Sancho meet a chain gang of galley slaves, all criminals, Quixote concludes that now is the time to right wrongs and aid the wretched. When the guards refuse to unshackle them, Quixote charges, and in the turmoil the criminals break their chains and the guards alternate their blows between Quixote, Sancho, and the thieves. In the confusion, the guards flee, abandoning their weapons. The criminals now turn upon Quixote and Sancho and steal their clothing. Chagrined at the succession of defeats and fearing further pursuit, Quixote and Sancho retreat to the mountains of Sierra Moreno, where, Quixote reasons, there is a setting better adapted to the adventures that he seeks, a place for the marvels like those of which he has read.

There, Don Quixote meets a double pair of lovers, Cardenio and Luscinda, Fernando and Dorotea. Cardenio is betrayed by his friend Fernando, who tries to win Luscinda away from Cardenio while breaking his engagement to Dorotea. Cardenio becomes mad, a foil to Don Quixote’s madness. Don Quixote, as helper of damsels in distress, becomes involved, and the lovers are all eventually reunited. This preoccupation with love inspires Quixote to send a love letter and a love poem to Dulcinea with Sancho, who returns to the home village. There, he joins the curate and the barber in a plot to bring Quixote back home. Dorotea will pretend that she is a distressed princess who has come from Guinea to seek redress for an injury done to her by a giant and to seek Don Quixote’s help.

En route to the village, they stop at an inn, where Don Quixote goes to sleep in the garret where wineskins are kept. Dreaming that he is engaged in a struggle with a giant, he begins to slash at the wineskins. Half awake, he mistakes the wine for the flow of blood. Even after thoroughly waking, he continues the battle and begins to look for the giant’s head on the floor, persuaded that he has cut it off. Sancho is so convinced that he looks for it too and assures the innkeeper’s daughter that he saw the monster.

Among the persons at the inn are a student and a former soldier with a Morisco maiden. Both soldier and student inspire lengthy discourses from Don Quixote on war and peace, on the treatment of students, on the treatment of soldiers, and on the comparisons between the professions of arms and letters. Artillery, Don Quixote says, is a diabolic device by which an infamous arm may take the life of a valiant knight without his knowing from where the blow came. Peace is the greatest blessing desirable in this life. The end of war is peace.

The student’s chief hardship is poverty. He must suffer hunger, cold, destitution, nakedness. The soldier is the poorest of the poor, dependent upon wretched pay, which comes late or never, and upon such booty as he can amass, to the peril of his life and conscience. On the day of battle, they place upon his head a doctor’s cap to heal the wound inflicted by some bullet that may have passed through his temple or left him mutilated. It is far easier to reward scholars than soldiers, for the former may receive posts, while the latter receive any compensation that their master has a disposition to give. Men of letters argue that, without them, men of arms cannot support themselves; men of arms reply that, without them, there can be no letters, since by their efforts states are preserved. To attain eminence in letters requires time, loss of sleep, hunger, headaches, and indigestion; to be a good soldier costs as much and more. The former soldier, pressed to tell his story, is revealed as a former captive of the Moors and enslaved by them. The captive’s tale has many elements derived from Cervantes’s own experiences in Algiers, and Cervantes himself appears briefly as a character in the tale.

Sancho, the curate, and the barber finally get Quixote home. Back home, he is warmly greeted by the townsfolk and taken to his house, where the niece and the housekeeper care for him. Quixote and Sancho do mention the possibility of a third sally, but the author does not know what will happen.

Don Quixote de la Mancha, Part 2

First published: Segunda parte del ingenioso cavallero don Quixote de la Mancha, 1615 (English translation, 1620)

Type of work: Novel

Don Quixote embarks with Sancho Panza on his third sally, which takes him into a larger and more variegated world.

Responding to criticism of part 1 and stung by the spurious sequel to Don Quixote by Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda, Cervantes restricts this novel more to the protagonists, with fewer interpolations and digressions. Don Quixote and Sancho are never lost to view, and the bonds between them are kept strong, even when they are separated.

In part 2, there is a refinement of the character of Don Quixote and a development of his saner nature, including moments of sanity when he comments on society in a mixed picture of madness and idealism. There is a corresponding refinement in the character of Sancho, as his understanding of and sympathy for Don Quixote develop. The world of part 2 is a much expanded world in which Don Quixote travels much farther from his native village, as far as Barcelona and the Mediterranean coast. It has a wider range of characters: peasants, bandits, traveling actors, shepherds, country squires, dukes, and Moriscos. Part 2 begins about a month after the end of part 1. Two new characters are introduced: Cid Hamete Benengeli, the Moorish author of Don Quixote, whom Cervantes frequently pretends to cite, and Sansón Carrasco, recent graduate of the University of Salamanca.

To cure Don Quixote’s madness, the curate and barber consult frequently with the niece and housekeeper. Finally satisfied that he has come to his senses, they come to the house and begin a discussion of statecraft, in which Don Quixote impresses them with his good sense, until the subject turns to chivalry and he again defends the old knightly virtues found in the romances against the sloth, arrogance, and theory over practice of the present age, persuading his auditors of a return of his madness. When Don Quixote asks Sancho’s opinions regarding criticisms of him, Sancho refers him to a book by Cid Hamete Benengeli, then mentions Sansón Carrasco, the student, who knows all about the book. Thus, Quixote and Sancho meet Sansón, who wins them over with flattery, although he is secretly allied with the curate and the barber, plotting stratagems to discourage Quixote as a knight.

The first concern of Don Quixote is to see his lady Dulcinea, so they set out for Toboso, Dulcinea’s hometown. Stopping just outside, Quixote sends Sancho into town to find her. Sancho, however, has no idea what she looks like, so Quixote decides on a trick of his own: He (Quixote) will approach the first farm girl he meets. Don Quixote sees only a farm girl and is bewildered. Sancho is hard pressed to convince him. The girl, annoyed, rides off. Sancho explains the snub nose, mole on lip, and the odor of garlic as enchantments, an explanation that satisfies Quixote.

Arriving at a woods, the two meet Sansón, disguised as a knight. His plan is to challenge Quixote’s mistress and in an ensuing clash of arms, defeat Don Quixote, who then by the rules of knighthood would be obligated to follow the bidding of the victor—in this case, to return to his village. Sansón’s plot fails, and Don Quixote and Sancho leave him behind in the care of a bone-setter. In the woods, Don Quixote also meets the Knight of the Wood, who, not recognizing him, boasts of having met and defeated all Spanish knights. Further discussion reveals that the Knight of the Wood had really met the spurious Don Quixote that Avellaneda had conceived.

Don Quixote meets a traveler, Don Diego de Miranda, with whom he engages in his favorite subject, knights-errant. Don Diego, intrigued by this now sensible, now mad man, invites him to his home. En route, they meet a carter bearing two lions in a cage on his way to the king. Ordered to get out of the way and warned that the lions are dangerous, Quixote, feeling a threat to his courage, orders the carter to open the cages. His companions retreat to a far distance, while he approaches one of the lions, braces his buckler, draws his sword, and faces the lion, which then turns around, stretches, yawns, washes its face, and then enters its cage and lies down. God upholds true chivalry, Quixote shouts, and then fixes the white cloth of victory on his lance. Quixote is a crazy sane man, an insane man on the verge of sanity, Don Diego concludes.

Later, Don Quixote meets a duke and a duchess on a hunt in the forest and is invited to their palace, where the hosts keep Quixote and Sancho for their amusement, proceeding to play a series of “jests” at their expense. At a dinner, Quixote speaks of the giants whom he has conquered and the enchanters whom he has met. An ecclesiastic at the table recognizes Quixote and answers him with a sermon about Don Quixote’s experiences, ridiculing his belief in these creatures. Angered, Quixote answers with a discourse on the high and narrow path of knight-errantry that rights wrongs and does good. The duke, to irritate the ecclesiastic, offers Sancho the governorship that Quixote had promised him.

Sancho’s tenure as governor of the Island of Barataria, actually a village in the duke’s domain, lasts but seven days, in which Don Quixote offers him much advice, and where Sancho very astutely settles petitions brought to him. Yet since this was another of the duke’s jests, the latter arranges a mock invasion, in which Sancho is badly bruised and decides that he has had enough.

Slapstick humor is provided by the account of a hunt, where Sancho, frightened by a boar, scrambles up a tree and is stuck until his screams are heard and he is freed. In another incident, Dulcinea’s disenchantment requires three thousand and some lashes on Sancho’s back, which Sancho performs on himself, out of sight but not out of hearing, so that he lashes the trees, with proper sound effects.

Sansón again attempts to best Don Quixote in knightly encounter, this time disguised as the Knight of the White Moon. He is successful. Quixote agrees to return to La Mancha for a year. Since he can no longer be a knight-errant, however, he will become Quixotic, a shepherd, with Sancho as Pancino, living among shepherds and shepherdesses, restoring the Arcadia of old. Back home, Don Quixote calmly announces that he is no longer Don Quixote but Alonso Quijano, the Good, and the enemy of the romances. The curate declares that Quijano, the Good, is dying but also sane. After writing his will, Quixote dies. The curate sends for a notary to witness that he is truly dead, lest some author other than Cid Hamet Benengeli try to resurrect him falsely.