Cervantes’ Don Quixote: A Literary Analysis
Cervantes and the Birth of the Modern Novel
The word novel comes from the Italian novella (meaning “new story”). However, the Italian novella refers to a short story, a slightly longer or more complex tale. A novel is a relatively extensive narrative text explaining events involving fictional characters, a setting, and a narrator. Descriptions and dialogues may appear to embellish, clarify, or make the action more entertaining. The genre as such emerged in the Modern Age.
Miguel de Cervantes: A Life in Literature
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra was a Spanish writer best known for his novel Don Quixote. He suffered economic hardship and began a military career that took him to Italy, where he came into contact with the Renaissance environment, which greatly influenced his work. He was nicknamed “The Cripple of Lepanto.” Captured by Barbary pirates and imprisoned in Algiers for five years, he was eventually released and began his literary career with the pastoral novel La Galatea (1585). Financial difficulties led him to travel to Seville as a tax collector. Lack of money landed him in prison, where he conceived Don Quixote.
The Ingenious Knight Don Quixote de la Mancha
The Ingenious Knight Don Quixote de la Mancha (in Spanish, El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha) is Miguel de Cervantes’ most successful work and one of the most translated books in world literature, after the Bible. Cervantes created a fictional origin for the story, pretending it was based on a manuscript by Cid Hamete Benengeli, an invented Moorish historian. It is a novel written in two parts, the first published in 1605 and the second in 1615. Between these two dates, an apocryphal second part appeared, written by Alonso Fernandez de Avellaneda.
From Parody to Profound Themes
The initial conception of this novel was to create a parody of chivalric romances, ridiculing the fact that they still held validity in the 16th century. However, the work soon evolved towards other perspectives and thematic challenges. Every age has sought to identify with some aspect of the book, demonstrating its enduring importance. Among the various themes, the conflict between reality and ideality stands out, between the illusion of life and the harshness of reality.
Don Quixote’s Constructed Reality
Don Quixote creates his own reality; it will be as he wishes, and this represents a huge panorama of originality in the literature of the time.
Character Evolution and Dialogue
The evolution of the characters shows us Sancho Panza, the paradigm of the people’s realistic sense, gradually absorbing his lord’s ideals, and Don Quixote ending his days recovering his sanity. The dialogue between the characters is one of the novel’s successes, incorporating the tradition of the Renaissance colloquium.
Narrative Perspective and Baroque Influence
The narrative point of view is complex because the story is presented as an impartial history from several sources. This alienation recalls the typical Baroque game of mirrors.
Metafiction and Irony
Literature within literature is one of the work’s merits, further enhanced by the irony of introducing life within literature. Thus, there are also reviews of Cervantes’ work, and in the second part, there is a constant reference to the false Quixote (which appeared after the first part), which ridicules the characters.
A New Epic: The Modern Novel
Don Quixote melts all previous literary tradition into a new sense of epic that marked the modern conception of the novel.