Don Quixote: A Timeless Tale of Adventure and Sanity
Don Quixote: A Masterpiece of Literature
Don Quixote narrates the adventures of Alonso Quijano, a gentleman of La Mancha who, driven mad by books, sets out in search of adventure. This work holds universal significance.
External Structure: A Work in Two Parts
The first part, entitled The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha, consists of 52 chapters that narrate Don Quixote’s first two sallies.
- In the first sally, Don Quixote is knighted by an innkeeper and returns home.
- In the second, Don Quixote seeks a squire, Sancho Panza, and together they travel to Sierra Morena in La Mancha. Events such as the episode with the windmills, the galley slaves, and the goatherds occur, interspersed with unrelated short stories.
The second part consists of 74 chapters and tells of the third sally of Don Quixote and Sancho.
The protagonists travel to Aragon and Catalonia. They participate in events at the palace of a duke, who recreates the world of chivalry to play a joke on Don Quixote. Sancho is appointed governor of an island. After Don Quixote is defeated by the Knight of the White Moon, who is actually Samson Carrasco, a neighbor, both return home. There, Quixote regains his sanity and dies. This section no longer includes interpolated stories, and the characters and dialogue are the center of attention.
Internal Structure: The Characters
The characters are revealed through dialogue. They include:
- Don Quixote: He undergoes an evolution, with his madness confined to the world of chivalry. He displays great wisdom, tolerance, and generosity, believing in justice and love, which he defends. He represents the passionate reader of literary works. When he regains his sanity, he falls into despair upon realizing he was never a hero and that heroes do not exist.
- Sancho Panza: He also evolves, but in the reverse direction of Don Quixote. Both become infected with each other’s characteristics, becoming two facets of a single character. Sancho represents the oral tradition and is a symbol of the common people.
- Dulcinea: She is the idealized image of a maiden in Don Quixote’s imagination, but in reality, she is a poor villager in a neighboring town.
- Samson Carrasco: The Knight of the White Moon, a family friend who becomes a knight to force Don Quixote to return home.
- The niece and housekeeper of Don Quixote.
Narrative Technique
The complexity of the novel is largely based on the narrator and the interplay of perspectives. There are at least three narrators:
- Initially, Cervantes claims to recount Don Quixote’s story based on data collected from the archives of La Mancha. This document serves as the basis up to the events of chapter 8.
- He explains that he chanced upon a manuscript in Arabic containing the continuation of the story.
- Cervantes says he hired a Moor to translate the Arabic manuscript, making the text a translation, and the third narrator would be the translator.
We observe a difference in narrative technique:
In the first part, episodes such as the windmills, the galley slaves, and Cabrera occur, and short, independent stories are interspersed.
The second part features a linear construction of the plot.
Language and Style
The language and style are naturally used to obtain:
- Dialogue: Stylistically, the novel is based on the dialogue of characters who reveal their way of being and thinking. Cervantes makes the characters speak according to their condition: Don Quixote uses the language of knights. Sancho, who cannot read or write, uses the language of the people, full of proverbs and numerous inaccuracies. Cervantes’s innovation is to have succeeded in creating autonomous, human characters, who build the language through speech and dialogue.
- Neologisms: Cervantes believes that language is a living thing, and the speakers and use of it have power over language.
- Irony: Cervantes’s humor is gentle, sympathetic to human defects and failures. It is not sharp but appears as a response to despair.
In the novel, Cervantes demonstrates his talent, combining narrative genres of the time:
- The chivalric genre: the main plot of the novel.
- The pastoral: allusions throughout the novel, and in episodes such as Chrysostom and Marcela.
- The Italian-style short stories: stories inserted such as the Curioso.
- The picaresque: the episode in which Don Quixote speaks with the galley oarsman.
- The sentimental novel: The story of Cardenio.
- The Moorish story: Appears in the history of the beautiful captive and Zoraida.
- Doctrinal Genre: Quixote gives advice to Sancho.