Don Quixote: Cervantes’ Masterpiece and Its Impact
Don Quixote
Genesis of the Work
Don Quixote is Cervantes’ masterpiece. It consists of two parts: the first appeared in 1605 with the title The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote, which was successful and was reissued. The second was published in 1615, titled The Ingenious Knight Don Quixote.
The main plot is the story of a poor gentleman who lost his mind from reading books of chivalry. His madness moves him to take to the field with weapons to redress wrongs, guided by his lady love. Adventures happen, he is misunderstood and has to face an unjust and mocking society.
Originality of Approach
- Recreates the theme of madness, which appeared in interludes of romance.
- Uses novelistic motifs, typical of the period.
- Maintains full courtly love in its most original body of the beloved’s perfections. The gentleman feels bound to her by a relation of vassalage and gets strength from that love.
- The old protagonist is a noble and poor character, compared to earlier gentlemen, who were strong, noble, and heroic.
- Romances offered a remote mythical world, while Cervantes uses immediate reality.
- Identifies the work’s heroism, the highest value of the time, with madness, the most deplorable state.
- Creatively uses narrative as a transformation of reality.
Topics
- Fills the chivalric novel and is the subject of parody. Cervantes criticizes the romances for their excessive and poor quality literary imagination.
- Love is approached from the perspective of courtly love, by a relationship of vassalage and spiritualized. It is manifested in the characters in some stories and in Dulcinea.
- The literary critic offers authors, works, and trends of the time. It can be seen in reflections on the play, showing Cervantes’ disagreement with the dramatic ideas of Lope de Vega.
- The existential struggle between man’s ideals and reality. Description is manifested in the large contrast between human values and selfish and ignoble behaviors.
- Prestige of arms or letters.
- Humor, born equally of an ingenious facet or parody and burlesque.
Structure
It is organized into two parts, covering three journeys with different scopes. Both have a dedication, foreword, and the following chapters (52 in the first half and 72 in the second).
Between the two parties, there is creative parallelism: at the beginning of both, the protagonist continuously experiences a series of adventures. In the middle, his wandering stops, and both occur in a number of literary events. The final sample shows Don Quixote, disillusioned and defeated, returning home.
Differences are that the first part is more spontaneous, and the second is more thought out and reflects a planned design. Before the second part, there is an unparalleled set of chapters in which Cervantes responds to the publication of Don Quixote by Avellaneda, an apocryphal work signed under the pseudonym of Alonso Fernández.
The false Quixote is mediocre but reveals the outrage that the publication of the first part had caused in the circle of Lope de Vega.
Characters
They are images of what Spain was like in the early seventeenth century. The world of work is formed by a range of social and ethnic types.
- The modest hidalgo Don Quixote de La Mancha, Alonso Quijano, who decides to become a knight-errant. His strange appearance is anachronistic to society, but he shows good sense and sets specific opinions on various subjects. The essential feature is the stubborn defense of his ideas.
- Sancho Panza is the squire in the books of chivalry accompanying the gentleman. His features are configured in the folk tradition and literary works, such as brief theatrical and carnival parades, where the simple, rustic, fool, dwarf, funny, or servant were common. But his development is a complex recreation that embodies the satire on chivalry books.
Intent and Meaning of Quixote
The explicit purpose of Cervantes is the parody of romances, which is why, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Quixote was read as a comic work. But since Romanticism, other values of the protagonist have been emphasized: the lady’s love, the longing for freedom, and the pursuit of justice, so that the novel represents the defense of ideals in a world that makes no sense.
Don Quixote is a portrait of society at the time. Cervantes offers a parody while showing the beginning of the decline of political power in Spain through a gentleman who tries to change his life. It is also a work of literary criticism and literary theory.