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.”
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Don Quixote
Miguel de Cervantes (1605) · 1072pages · Renaissance / Spanish Golden Age · 8 AP appearances
Summary
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.
Why It 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 ...
Themes & Motifs
Diction & Style
Register: 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.
Narrator: The narrator of Don Quixote is the most unreliable narrator in Western literature. He claims to be translating from a...
Figurative Language: High in parody
Historical Context
Spanish Golden Age (Siglo de Oro) — late 16th to early 17th century: Don Quixote is set in a Spain whose old aristocratic order (the world of knights, honor, and chivalric service) is visibly dying, replaced by a mercantile, imperial, increasingly bureaucratic moder...
Key Characters
Talking Points
- Why does Cervantes invent the fictional Arabic historian Cide Hamete Benengeli instead of simply narrating the story himself? What does this device do to the reader's relationship with the text?
- Don Quixote sees windmills as giants. Sancho sees giants as windmills (in the enchanted Dulcinea scene). Who is more wrong, and why?
- Cervantes kills Don Quixote at the end of Part II explicitly to prevent other authors from writing sequels. Is this a literary decision, a legal one, or something else? Does it affect how you read the death scene emotionally?
- Sancho Panza governs Barataria with more practical wisdom than anyone around him expects. What does this reveal about the relationship between education and intelligence in this novel?
- The Duke and Duchess have read Part I and use Quixote and Sancho for entertainment. Are they more 'sane' than Quixote? Are they better people?
Notable Quotes
“He so immersed himself in those romances that he spent whole nights from sunset to sunrise, and his days from dawn to dusk, poring over them; and w...”
“Fortune is guiding our affairs better than we ourselves could have wished. Do you see over yonder, friend Sancho, thirty or forty hulking giants? I...”
“Love and war are the same thing, and stratagems and policy are as allowable in the one as in the other.”
Why Read This
Because every question about fiction — What is real? What is madness? Who controls the narrative? — gets asked here first and answered better than anywhere else. Don Quixote invents the novel and simultaneously writes a critique of every novel tha...