Don Quixote

Emma Bovary is explicitly a female Quixote — driven mad by romantic novels into misreading her own life as a romance. Flaubert acknowledged the debt.

Gatsby, like Quixote, invents himself from fantasy and pursues an ideal that destroys him. Both novels ask whether the beautiful dream was worth having.

Written within the same decade, both feature a man who knows the world is wrong and cannot successfully act in it. Quixote acts without knowing; Hamlet knows without acting.

Ahab charges his white whale as Quixote charges his windmills — an obsessive pursuit that destroys everyone around the pursuer. Melville cited Cervantes directly.

Josef K., like Quixote, operates by rules that reality refuses to honor and is destroyed by a system he cannot understand or defeat.

Dostoevsky's Underground Man, like Quixote, defines himself against the practical materialism of his world and is destroyed by his own idealism — but with none of Quixote's grace.