Don Quixote

Alonso Quijano's library-induced madness, his self-christening as Don Quixote, his first humiliating sortie alone, his recruitment of Sancho Panza, and the famous windmill attack.

A series of encounters at and around a roadside inn: the Cardenio story, Dorotea's disguise as Princess Micomicona, Quixote's battle with wineskins, and the priest's plot to lure him home.

The inn becomes a literary salon as the priest reads aloud a discovered manuscript. Quixote defends chivalric romance against its critics, fights a puppet theater, and is finally transported home in a cage while debating the nature of reality with a canon.

Quixote and Sancho emerge into a world that has read Part I. They encounter the university student Sansón Carrasco, set out for El Toboso to find Dulcinea, and Sancho deceives Quixote into believing a peasant girl is his enchanted lady.

Quixote descends into the Cave of Montesinos and returns with a vision no one believes, including possibly himself. They encounter Master Peter's prophesying ape and puppet theater, which Quixote again attacks.

A wealthy nobleman and his wife invite Quixote and Sancho to their estate for elaborate staged entertainments. Sancho is made governor of Barataria and governs with surprising wisdom before resigning. Quixote is increasingly tormented by the Duke's household.

Quixote and Sancho travel to Barcelona. Quixote is defeated on the beach by the Knight of the White Moon, revealed to be Sansón Carrasco. Bound by honor, he begins the journey home.

Quixote returns home broken in spirit. He sleeps for six days, wakes sane, renounces his knight-errant identity as Alonso Quijano the Good, and dies of grief within days.

A thematic analysis of Don Quixote's central concerns: the nature of reality and perception, the ethics of idealism, the function of madness, the Cervantes-narrator relationship, and the novel's invention of modernity.

An analysis of the master-servant relationship as the novel's emotional core: how two men who should have nothing in common transform each other across 1,072 pages.