Cervantes’ Don Quixote: Themes, Characters, and Meaning
Don Quixote: Cervantes’ Masterpiece
Don Quixote is Cervantes’ masterpiece. The first part was published in 1605, and the second, ten years later. The two parts are quite different: the first is more spontaneous, seems written on the fly, and contains diverse elements. The second is much more designed and responds to a well-laid plan.
Both show some structural parallels: after a few initial chapters, a series of adventures happen continuously amidst the protagonist’s wanderings. There are continuous stops in the inn in the first part and at the Duke’s home in the second, where very diverse events happen, all with a marked literary complexion. The end of the two parts is also symmetrical: disillusioned and defeated, Don Quixote returns home. The second part contains a set of chapters in which Cervantes responds to the publication of Don Quixote by Avellaneda.
Characters in Don Quixote
Don Quixote is a modest gentleman who, driven mad by reading books of chivalry, decides to become a knight-errant himself. His strange and anachronistic figure in early seventeenth-century Spain makes him an essentially comical character. However, he is very complex: outside his peculiar knightly madness, he shows good sense and wisdom on a wide range of issues. An essential feature of his character is the stubborn defense of his ideas, including those that come from his strange madness, which causes him to be continually battered by reality.
Sancho Panza, his squire, accompanies the hero. Cervantes summarizes many folklore characteristics in him, such as the simple type, jester, rustic simpleton, dwarf, funny, and mischievous. But he is a more complete character; from a folkloric model, he grows beyond his original comic function, and his figure becomes a satire of chivalry books. A characteristic of the two main characters would be the transfer of traits from one another, leading to the quixotization of Sancho and the sanchification of Don Quixote. All the characters are influenced by traits of others.
Intention and Meaning of Don Quixote
The purpose of Don Quixote is a burlesque parody of books of chivalry. As a comical book, it was read almost exclusively during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. From Romanticism to today, readers of the novel tend to appreciate his desire for freedom, his courage, his faith in justice, and his absolute love for Dulcinea. The novel is an ideal defense in a world where great ideals have lost their meaning. Cervantes argues for the defense of certain ideals of the Renaissance world. Chivalric literature was already discredited, and it would be meaningless simply to compose a work parodying it. The nature of the protagonist’s insanity, against all common sense and all experience, makes the character pathetic.
Besides being a novel of ideas with humor and universal scope, it is a book of literary criticism and theory. In Cervantes’s work, the characters constantly talk about literature and make judgments about the literary genres of the sixteenth century, as well as concepts and ideas about topics, genres, and literary forms. The work itself is an exercise in literary experimentation; narratives are pastoral, Moorish, and courtly, with poems and dialogues. It is also a social story: nobles, knights, and squires crave to retrieve a dignified social position, and there is Moorish persecution. Chivalry books give a perfect and beautiful image of his past glory. Sancho Panza represents the poor peasant craving to prosper. Finally, both characters are a reflection of society, where the key to greatness and the desire to thrive had become a widespread obsession.
Cervantes parodies the delusion, typical of humanistic Utopia of the sixteenth century, which is now a useless response to the problems of Spain at the time. The final lesson that everyone would understand is that one is the son of his works and is worth as much as they are worth.