Cervantes, Don Quixote, and the Baroque Prose
Cervantes and the Baroque Prose
Life and Thought
Miguel de Cervantes’s life is marked by three distinct stages: his military career, his work as a supplies manager in Seville, and his final 11 years dedicated to writing, beginning with La Galatea in 1585.
Three factors shaped Cervantes’s thinking: the decline of the Spanish Empire, the transition from Renaissance to Baroque, and his own life experiences. His writing explores themes of Christianity, reason, faith, humanism, utopianism, individual conscience, justice, freedom, and anticlericalism. Cervantes demonstrates remarkable tolerance, acknowledging multiple perspectives on reality and avoiding single interpretations of events. This creates ambiguity between appearance and reality, sanity and madness.
The Novel by Cervantes
Cervantes, inheriting the tradition of La Celestina and Lazarillo de Tormes, revolutionized storytelling, creating the modern novel. He championed the novel as an artistic and moral form, blending credibility and imagination. Rejecting the anti-realism and idealism of his time, Cervantes embraced a realistic literary style that depicted contemporary life. While striving for realism, he occasionally incorporated fantastical elements and hallucinatory visions to illuminate the workings of the real world.
Language and Style
Cervantes’s language reflects the characters’ diverse attitudes towards life. His plays showcase a rich array of vocal and linguistic resources. He believed the novel’s style should be natural and anti-rhetorical, prioritizing reader enjoyment. Simplicity and naturalness characterize his narrators. Cervantes masterfully employs irony, humor, and parody, creating a nimble and fluid style that conveys spontaneity and verisimilitude.
Narrative Works
- La Galatea: A pastoral novel echoing Jorge de Montemayor’s Seven Books of Diana, featuring artificial dialogues on love, nature, and poetry between shepherds Elicio and Galatea, and Damon and Thirsis.
- The Work of Persiles and Sigismunda: A Byzantine novel narrating the adventures, love affairs, and separations of Peri and Sigismunda, who overcome numerous obstacles to finally wed.
- Don Quixote: A pinnacle of world literature, parodying chivalric romances to expose their “false and foolish tales.”
Don Quixote: Structure
The book is divided into two parts:
1st) Published in 1605, Don Quixote, it performs two exits from your pueblo.Se introduces us to Don Alonso Quijano as a gentleman come unless you go crazy reading books of chivalry. Sale adventures up and defend the weak in the pursuit of winning the love of Dulcinea, a peasant from which he had been in love without her armor saberlo.Se badly and manufactures a part in a horse of bad press. ” Undertake the journey to a sale as you take a castle, And mocks the innkeeper, was knighted. Returning a child is still work over and then has an affront to some merchants of the stand that goes wrong, a neighbor and leads him to find his casa.Seguidamente, his friends are dedicated to destroying his books and the library wall, he believed to have been a spell and returns to the adventure, persuading Sancho Panza to follow him. It takes place the battle against the windmills, and freed some prisoners of the Inquisition and finally the bachelor Samson and the priest of his people deceived him and lead him in a cage until pueblo.2 meetings) In 1614 Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda published his Quixote a fake book in which Cervantes is insulting. When it appeared Avellaneda’s Quixote was almost written the second part of the real Don Quixote, Avellaneda also predicted the end in Cervantes’ Don Quixote as Cervantes Aragon handed the work I had done so in part two of the Cataluña.LaQuixote was published in 1615 and she again convince Don Quixote to Sancho to follow him, come to Aragon, where some noble mocks them and named Sancho governor of an island, and this just hating the power and corruption of office . On the beaches of Catalonia has a fight with the white knight of the moon (Bachelor Sanson Carrasco), who forces him to return to his village. On the way back after a deep sleep and restore sanity and old confesses, makes a will and dies a few days. Process composition and literary sources: Originally Cervantes wanted to do an exemplary novel, based on the farce of the romances, (The first six chapters of the work are the same), but realized that the work had potential and decided to lengthen it, saying it had found the story and was written by Cid Hamet Benengeli and translated it and on that basis the continuó.Dándose the success of the first part, decides to write a second to tell the third exit at Don Quijote.Copia romances elements asAmadis of Gaul, Tirant lo Blanc or Orlando Furioso, but the ridicule and gives it a touch of parody. Don Quixote and Sancho. The character of Don Quixote, undergoes an evolution throughout the novel. In part, tries to accommodate the reality to your imagination. When you see how the real world imposes on their dreams, far from correct and accept reality as it is, try to justify their failures blamed on intervention by lovely. In the second part, Don Quixote sees things as they really are, but now thinks that his senses are deceiving him and lead him astray. The evolution of his personality is a “desquijotización” shortly before his death and recover cordura.El Sancho Panza character emerges to show the personality of Don Quixote through dialogue. If Sancho is a simple man and leaves his family is because he sees in it the possibility of making a fortune, but little by little ligand Don Quixote ever more closely. Sancho is a principle of reason and pragmatism and it becomes the bastion of good sense, infinite patience and noble sentiments.