Don Quixote is a worn-out, older Spanish gentleman who sets off on a great imagined quest to win honor and glory in the name of his imaginary damsel-in-distress, Dulcinea. Don Quixote is much more; he is larger than life. He represents Cervantes’s satire of the sixteenth-century Spanish aristocracy. Don Quixote longs for a world that does not exist—a world of beauty and achievement. He naively seeks to bring order into this Renaissance world by Middle Age chivalry. But Don Quixote, nearly blind figuratively and literarily, with the best of intentions, harms everyone around him.

As the novel progresses, Don Quixote, with the help of his modern, loyal squire, Sancho, who is able to see things as they are, slowly distinguishes between reality and the pictures in his head. Even though he ceases to attack windmills, he never loses his conviction that fair Dulcinea is his salvation from all heartache.

But I like the clearn, naïve idealism of Quixote. I suppose I have attacked a windmill or two myself. I disagree with author/critic Vladimir Nabokov who wrote:

Both parts of Don Quixote form a veritable encyclopedia of cruelty. From that viewpoint it is one of the most bitter and barbarous books ever penned. And its cruelty is artistic. The extraordinary commentators who talk through their academic caps or birettas of the humorous and humane mellowly Christian atmosphere of the book, or a happy world where “all is sweetened by the humanities of love and good fellowship,” and particularly those who talk of a certain “kindly duchess” who “entertains the Don” in the second Part—these gushing experts have probably been reading some other book or are looking through some rosy gauze at the brutal world of Cervantes’ novel.

Critic Joseph Wood Krutch argued that Don Quixote strove “for that synthesis of the comedy and tragedy of life which we recognize as the distinguishing mark of the modern novel [and I would add the modern life].”
. Several years ago, the story of Don Quixote was adapted as the musical play Man of La Mancha. In this version, at Quixote’s deathbed, Sancho promises to continue Don Quixote’s mission. I think Cervantes would have been pleased with this ending.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 10th, 2007 at 9:30 am and is filed under Classics, Literary Criticism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.