The Literature Book

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by his imagination into fearsome

enemies, with whom he sees fit

to engage in combat.

Further complexity

The gap between reality and

illusion is the source of the book’s

comedy (and no less its tragedy),

and is a theme that has nourished

fiction across the world in the

subsequent four centuries.

Yet, having established his

theme, Cervantes deepens and

complicates it in the second part

of his novel, which was published

10 years after the first part.

In Cervantes’ Part Two, the

characters—including Don Quixote

himself—have read, or at least

heard of, the first part of the

novel in which they appear. When

strangers encounter Don Quixote

and Sancho Panza in person, they

already know their famous history.

A duke and duchess, for example,

are excited when they meet Don

Quixote, having read all about his

adventures. They think it amusing

to deceive him for entertainment,

setting in play a string of imagined

adventures, which result in a series

of sadistic practical jokes. Honor—

Cervantes suggests—clearly has

nothing to do with social position.

Readers begin to laugh less.

While Cervantes was writing Part

Two, a spurious Second Volume

of the Ingenious Gentleman Don

Quixote of La Mancha by the

Licenciado Alonso Fernández de

Avellaneda, of Tordesillas appeared.

Cervantes’ literary creation had

been stolen, inciting his comment,

at the end of Part Two: “For me

alone was Don Quixote born, and

I for him; it was his to act, mine to

write.” In literary revenge, Cervantes

sends his knight and squire off to

Barcelona, to kidnap a character

from the Avellaneda book.

Stories within stories

Literature is itself also a theme

in the novel. We are told that Don

Quixote’s delusions result from

reading too much—an interesting

proposition to present to a reader

of Don Quixote. But even when Don

Quixote’s books are burned by the

priest, housekeeper, and barber,

his improbable quest for glory

continues. The role of the book’s

narrator is also questioned. Far

from disappearing behind his

characters and story, Cervantes

makes frequent appearances,

DON QUIXOTE

ostensibly in his own voice or often

in the guise of a narrator called

Cide Hamete Benengeli, a Moorish

storyteller. The first words of the

novel—“In some village in La

Mancha, whose name I do not care

to recall”—exhibit the narrator’s

willfulness as well as the author’s

control over his material.

The novel is written in episodic

form, laying the groundwork for the

many road novels and films that

would follow. Most of the characters

whom Don Quixote and Sancho

Panza encounter have a story

to tell, providing the novel with

a format familiar to readers of

Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales

and Boccaccio’s Decameron, and

of the canon of tales from the East

that entered southern Spain in the

long centuries of Arab rule.

For example, one of the novel’s

minor characters, Ricote, a Morisco

(a Muslim forcibly converted to

Christianity), recounts his exile

from Spain—a story within a story

that introduces historical facts to

the fictional narrative. The expulsion

of the Moriscos in 1609 was highly

topical, and whereas the earlier

Finally, from so little sleeping

and so much reading, his

brain dried up and he went

completely out of his mind.

Don Quixote

In the second part of Don Quixote,

Cervantes himself appears as a character,

and other versions of Quixote are introduced.

Reality is reflected by these various mirrors,

deliberately confusing life and literature.

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