Cervantes’ masterpiece, Don Quixote, is a satirical novel about the conflict between ideals and reality. Through the adventures of the chivalrous Don Quixote and the realist Sancho, it hilariously explores human dreams and frustrations.
About the work
The full title is El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha. The first installment was published in 1605 and the second in 1615. Cervantes intended to write a parody of the chivalric tales that were very popular in Spain at the time, as he said, “to overthrow the authority and popularity of chivalric tales.” However, as he wrote without any plan, following his inspiration, he forgot his original intentions and became absorbed in the new purpose of creating the characters of the protagonist, Don Quixote, and his servant, Judge Sancho, and the whole of their lives.
The book is by no means a mere joke or satire. The French critic A. Thibaudet called it “a book of humanity” and praised it as the first and best novel that truly depicts “man”.
The plot
Aronso Quijano, a rural Spanish gentleman, reads chivalric tales day and night, becomes insane, and declares himself a medieval knight of fortune, riding a handsome horse named Rocinante on the road of fortune to cut through the injustices of the world and help the abused. Don Quixote’s love, Princess Dulcinea, is the product of his madness and delusions, and he has as his servant Judge Sancho, a simple, upright peasant who lives nearby. His chivalric madness and delusions collide with the real world wherever they go, causing him to be laughed at by those around him, and causing him and his chamberlain Sancho to experience bitter failure and defeat. Eventually, his nephew and housekeeper burn all the books in his library, blaming Don Quixote’s strange knightly novels for his eccentricities, but he goes on another ride, mistakes a windmill for a giant and attacks it, falls off his horse, mistakes a flock of grazing sheep for soldiers and is beaten by the shepherds, and attacks a wineskin troop as a giant and is beaten by the innkeeper. However, his will and courage are not deterred when a sorcerer tells him that his enemies are in disguise.
Meet the characters
Don Quixote
A country gentleman from La Mancha who has read so many chivalric tales that he has lost the ability to distinguish between reality and imagination. He is prone to daydreaming and misbehavior, but he has strong convictions, willpower, and a clear sense of morality.
Judge Sancho
A rural servant who follows Don Quixote around like a shadow. He is a unique character who is materialistic and down-to-earth, yet foolish and common, in contrast to his master Don Quixote’s noble and idealistic personality.
Princess Dulcinea
A beautiful princess created in Don Quixote’s imagination and Don Quixote’s lover, but in reality she is the daughter of a large and powerful peasant who lives in the same village. She never actually appears in the story.
Rocinante
Don Quixote’s skinny, old horse.
Commentary on the works
When it comes to Western authors, William Shakespeare and Miguel de Cervantes are probably the two most representative. They are the two pillars that support the house of Western literature. They were born around the same time and, interestingly, died in the same year. While one made his mark in theater, the other was the midwife to the birth of the novel. While Shakespeare is revered as the “national poet of England,” Cervantes is revered as the “spirit of Spain,” with some scholars calling him the “prince of wisdom.
Cervantes wrote in virtually every genre of literature, leaving no genre untouched. He wrote short stories called “novellas,” which became popular in Italy around this time, as well as full-length novels. I also wrote several plays and poems. In other words, he dabbled in every genre except criticism. However, Cervantes’ fame as a literary figure was brought to him by Don Quixote. Once a tax collector, he was imprisoned in the Royal Prison of Seville for failing to account for his taxes. It was during his imprisonment that he first conceived of this work.
Background and content
Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote was originally titled El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha. Part I was published in 1604, and Part II was published in 1615, just a year before the author’s death. It’s a huge work with 126 chapters, 52 in the first part and 74 in the second, and more than 650 characters.
It’s interesting to note that before Cervantes published his sequel, a man named Alonso Fernández de Abeyaneda published a sequel in 1614. This masterpiece inspired Cervantes to write a sequel in a hurry. In addition to Abeyaneda’s masterpiece, there were many other works based on Don Quixote, such as The Life of Don Quixote, The History of Don Quixote, and The Female Don Quixote.
In the 16th century, a gentleman named Alonso Quijano lived in a small town called La Mancha in Spain. His only pleasure was reading chivalric romances in which beautiful women were rescued from danger, giants were fought, and dragons were slain. But reading too many books made him unable to distinguish between reality and fiction. Kihano’s mind became delusional and he began to believe that the stories were real. Eventually, he decides to become a knight himself, and so, armed with an old suit of armor, a rusty sword, and a helmet, he sets out on an adventure on an old horse. Just as the protagonist of the chivalric romance loves the ideal beautiful woman, he gives a country maiden whom he does not know very well the wonderful name of ‘Dulcinea’ and changes his name to ‘Don Quixote’ and takes a peasant named Judge Sancho as his servant to go on adventures with him.
The story is about all sorts of adventures that the protagonist has. He mistakes a windmill for a giant and falls off his horse while attacking it, and he attacks a flock of grazing sheep because he thinks they’re soldiers and is beaten by the shepherd. The story of the windmill attack is so famous that the phrase “tilting at windmills” has become a Western idiom for recklessly charging at an enemy that isn’t there. Or attacking a leather bag of wine and mistaking it for blood when the red wine spilled out. Whenever his actions are revealed to be a mistake, he always assumes that a sorcerer has concocted a trick to get him into trouble.
Don Quixotism
Don Quixote is a panoramic depiction of humanity in all its forms. Shakespeare is famous for his depiction of different human types in his plays, but Cervantes is no slouch either. The French literary critic Charles Auguste Sainte-Beuve called it “the bible of humanity”. Don Quixotism, named after him, is a term often used to describe a chivalrous attitude, a daydreaming attitude, or an out-of-touch view of reality.
Among the many characters, the protagonist, Don Quixote, and his servant, Judge Sancho, are the most prominent. These two characters contrast with each other like fire and ice. Despite being prone to daydreaming and misbehaving, Don Quixote is a model knight with strong convictions, willpower, and a clear sense of morality. He symbolizes idealism, dreams, spirit, and fantasy.
On the other hand, the servant, Judge Sancho, is an extremely mundane and worldly character who follows Don Quixote’s actions only because of the material rewards, even though he is well aware of the insanity of his behavior. Judge Sancho symbolizes realism, reality, substance, and facts. Because of these opposing characterizations, some critics have tried to find the theme of the play in the conflict between idealism and realism.
However, it is important to note that the two men gradually resemble each other’s personalities. At first, Judge Sancho thinks that Don Quixote is mentally ill, and he questions him and sometimes argues with him. However, during the course of the adventure, their personalities merge and become one. In terms of speech alone, Don Quixote begins to speak in a proverbial, rural voice like Judge Sancho, and Judge Sancho imitates Don Quixote’s chivalrous, noble speech. Eventually, the two characters become indistinguishable from one another. In a sense, Don Quixote and Judge Sancho are not two different people, but two different aspects of the same person.
We all have a little bit of Don Quixote in us and a little bit of Judge Sancho in us, albeit to different degrees. We dream of heavenly idealism, but we are rooted in the earth. The two characters represent imagination and rationality, but they also symbolize the human soul and body. In late medieval literature, the “debate between body and soul” in the form of a dialog was very popular. Just as idealism and realism, imagination and rationality, and soul and body cannot be thought of separately, Don Quixote and Judge Sancho cannot be thought of separately.
Central themes of the work
There are many themes that Cervantes addresses in Don Quixote, but the relationship between fiction and fact, fantasy and reality, stands out.
The themes surrounding fiction, fact, fantasy, and reality become more apparent when we come to the question, “How far is Don Quixote from madness? From a psychiatric perspective, Don Quixote is clearly delusional and disoriented, but from another angle, he behaves like a perfectly normal person. It’s not always easy to tell what’s fantasy and what’s reality, or what’s fiction and what’s fact.
As is often the case with great classics, “Don Quixote” was ahead of its time. When reading it, the shadow of postmodernism often looms large. Although it was published in the 17th century, it’s easy to recognize postmodern elements. This is because this novel, with its self-conscious characterization, can be seen as the first chapter of metafiction. Cervantes constantly breaks down the boundaries between reality and fiction in his works; for him, the realist tradition of creating an illusion of reality has no place. In Don Quixote, Cervantes does not give the reader an illusion of reality, but rather tries to shatter it. He reminds us that literary works are not reflections of reality, but artificial constructs created by the author through language. From the point of view of classicist aesthetics, which strives to accept the events in the work as real, it is a curse for the author to shatter the illusion or reveal the creative process.
In another sense, this work can be called a ‘novel of novels’. Throughout the history of Western literature, many writers have drawn artistic inspiration from Cervantes. For example, English writers such as Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett, Lawrence Sterne, Walter Scott, and Charles Dickens owe a great deal to him. Gustave Flaubert, Pérez Galdós, Herman Melville, Nikolai Gogol, and Fyodor Dostoevsky were also deeply influenced by him. Flaubert, in particular, called the heroine of Madame Bovary “Don Quixote in a skirt”. In the 20th century, things were not much different, with writers such as James Joyce and Jorge Luis Borges being directly or indirectly influenced by Cervantes.
Don Quixote has inspired not only writers but also other artists. Since the 17th century, many plays, operas, ballets, and musical compositions have been based on the novel, and in the 20th century, movies, television programs, and comics have been adapted. Painters such as William Hogarth, Francisco de Goya, Onore Domier, and Pablo Picasso were also greatly influenced by Cervantes. This is why Cervantes is not just a novelist of the Renaissance, but an artist of artists.
