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.”
Character Analysis
The most complex fool in literature. His madness is real, his values are genuine, his courage is consistent, and his failure is total. He is the first character in Western fiction to have an inner life that changes across a book's length — he is different at the end of Part II from what he was at the beginning of Part I, and the difference has been earned by experience. His sanity at death is not a cure but a defeat.
Formal, Latinate, archaic — the language of books he has memorized, not of living speech. He uses the archaic pronoun 'thou' and subjunctive constructions that were already old-fashioned in 1605.