Classical Novels

Don Quixote

Cervantes

What is the ‘real’, but the product of conviction and belief? Will the imaginary be real if one is so convinced that such is in existence? If so, then will a man, convinced of being a knight, truly be so?

“Don Quixote”, the greatest Spanish novel to be written, was penned by Spanish great Cervantes. It depicts a story of a man, under the influence of reading too many tales of valor, of who firmly believes that he, himself, is a knight of old times. Along with his ever so faithful ‘squire’ Sancho Panza.

Don Quixote is a middle-aged gentleman from the region of La Mancha in central Spain. Obsessed with the chivalrous ideals touted in books he has read, he decides to take up his lance and sword to defend the helpless and destroy the wicked. He set forth with a somewhat befuddled laborer named Sancho Panza, whom he has persuaded to accompany him as his faithful squire. In return for Sancho’s services, Don Quixote promises to make Sancho the wealthy governor of an isle. On his horse, Rocinante, a barn nag well past his prime, Don Quixote rides the roads of Spain in search of glory and grand adventure.

Cervantes relates the story of Don Quixote as a history, which he claims he has translated from a manuscript written by a Moor named Cide Hamete Benengeli. Cervantes becomes a party to his own fiction, even allowing Sancho and Don Quixote to modify their own histories and comment negatively upon the false history published in their names.

In the end, the beaten and battered Don Quixote forswears all the chivalric truths he followed so fervently and dies from a fever. With his death, knights-errant become extinct. Benengeli returns at the end of the novel to tell us that illustrating the demise of chivalry was his main purpose in writing the history of Don Quixote.