Don Quixote
Miguel de Cervantes (1605)
“The first modern novel — a mad knight who invented himself as a hero, written by a man who never received the recognition he deserved.”
At a Glance
Alonso Quijano, a middle-aged Spanish gentleman driven mad by reading too many chivalric romances, renames himself Don Quixote de la Mancha and sets out as a knight-errant to right wrongs and win glory. With his loyal squire Sancho Panza at his side, he mistakes windmills for giants, inns for castles, and a peasant woman for his idealized lady Dulcinea. Part I (1605) ends with his friends tricking him home in a cage. Part II (1615) finds him famous — the real-world public has read Part I — before he is defeated by the Knight of the White Moon, recants his madness, and dies sane and disillusioned.
Read full summary →Why This Book Matters
Don Quixote is the most translated secular work in the history of the Western canon. It is routinely called the first modern novel — the first extended prose fiction to use an unreliable narrator, to treat its own fictionality as a subject, to create complex interiority in its characters, and to explore the relationship between stories and reality as a genuine philosophical problem. Published in two parts in 1605 and 1615, it was an immediate bestseller across Europe, translated into English within a decade, and has never been out of print in any major language.
Diction Profile
Formally elevated in narration and Quixote's speech; proverbial and colloquial in Sancho's speech. The gap between registers is itself the novel's primary comic and thematic device.
High in parody