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Don Quixote
Contents
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▸Translator's Preface, Biographical Account, and Critical Essay23
John Ormsby surveys the history of English translations of Don Quixote, argues that faithful unsmiling gravity is the translator's paramount duty, traces Cervantes's life from Lepanto through Algerian captivity to the composition of the novel, and analyses the book's universal appeal — its combination of farce, character study, and humanist wisdom — while dismantling the theory that it is a philosophical allegory.
- Cervantes fought at Lepanto in 1571 while ill with fever, received three gunshot wounds, and permanently lost the use of his left hand
- Captured by Algerian pirates, he organized four escape attempts over five years, each time taking sole responsibility to protect companions from punishment
- The essence of Cervantine humour is unsmiling gravity; flippant translations destroy the book by substituting visible authorial winking for this invisibility
- The choice of La Mancha — the dullest region of Spain — makes every romantic delusion ludicrous by contrast with actual surroundings
- In Part I Don Quixote is largely a puppet of chivalric convention; in Part II he develops genuine individual character with real affection, irascibility, and wisdom
▸Cervantes's Preface to Part I62
Cervantes addresses the reader with characteristic irony, confessing anxiety about launching a plain, unlearned book. A witty friend shows how easy it would be to fake scholarly apparatus and clinches the argument: the book needs none because its only purpose is to destroy the authority of the chivalry romances through plain truth to nature.
- Cervantes calls himself the stepfather, not the father, of Don Quixote — deliberately distancing himself from excessive authorial pride
- The preface parodies learned book conventions by showing how absurdly easy it would be to fabricate scholarly apparatus
- The stated purpose of the book is solely to discredit and destroy the influence of the books of chivalry
- Cervantes says he values Sancho Panza above the fame of Don Quixote, presenting the squire as the book's true gift to the reader
▸Part I, Chapters I–IV: Don Quixote's First Sally77
An ageing La Mancha gentleman loses his sanity through excessive reading of chivalric romances, names himself Don Quixote, renames his horse Rocinante and his imagined lady Dulcinea del Toboso, gets himself dubbed a knight at a roadside inn in a farcical ceremony, and immediately fails his first act of knight-errantry when a boy he rescues from a flogging is beaten worse the moment Don Quixote rides away.
- The gentleman sold tillage land to buy books of chivalry; his favourite was Feliciano de Silva's ornate, deliberately incomprehensible prose
- Dulcinea del Toboso is an entirely invented persona grafted onto a real farm girl he has barely seen
- The dubbing ceremony uses an inn account-book, a candle-end, and two prostitutes as participants, yet Don Quixote receives it with complete solemnity
- His first act of chivalric justice — rescuing the shepherd boy Andres — immediately fails because real-world power relations cannot be reformed by rhetoric and a lance
▸Part I, Chapters V–VIII: The Second Sally — Sancho, the Windmills, and Early Mishaps106
After the book-burning scrutiny of his library, Don Quixote recovers and persuades the peasant Sancho Panza to serve as squire with the promise of an island governorship. The pair set out on the second sally. Don Quixote charges windmills he insists are giants, is hurled from his horse, and blames an enchanting enemy. Further misadventures follow: a brawl with Yanguesan carriers leaves both men battered, and the inn episode introduces the comic pattern of elaborate delusion meeting grubby reality.
- Sancho Panza is introduced: an honest but credulous labourer motivated by the lure of island governance
- The windmill episode is the novel's most iconic scene of chivalric delusion colliding with plain reality; Don Quixote attributes his defeat to the enchanter Friston
- Don Quixote introduces the found-manuscript device in Chapter IX: the story is attributed to the Arab historian Cid Hamete Benengeli, purchased as pamphlets in Toledo
- Marcela's speech at Chrysostom's graveside (Chapters XIII–XIV) is the novel's most sustained piece of feminist philosophical argument: beauty does not create an obligation to return love
▸Part I, Chapters XVII–XXII: Balsam, Sheep-Armies, and the Galley Slaves201
Don Quixote brews his balsam of Fierabras and suffers comic consequences; mistakes a flock of sheep for rival armies and is stoned; is dubbed Knight of the Rueful Countenance by Sancho; encounters a funeral procession in the dark; and in the fulling-mill episode demonstrates his courage before a humiliatingly mundane source. He liberates a chain gang of galley slaves, who stone him in return, and the pair flee into the Sierra Morena.
- The balsam cures Don Quixote through violent purging but makes Sancho worse — illustrating how chivalric privileges are reserved for dubbed knights
- Sancho coins the sobriquet 'Knight of the Rueful Countenance' from his master's battered appearance
- Don Quixote's liberation of the galley slaves is his most consequential act of delusion: he mistakes royal justice for tyranny; the slaves' immediate ingratitude is the episode's central irony
- The enchanter as explanatory device is fully established: every failed outcome is attributed to a malicious enchanter who transforms reality to rob Don Quixote of glory
▸Part I, Chapters XXIII–XXX: The Sierra Morena — Penance, Cardenio, and Dorothea272
Fleeing into the Sierra Morena, Don Quixote enacts a voluntary penance of love-madness modelled on chivalric literary examples. The curate and barber, searching for him, discover first the mad Cardenio — whose love-betrayal by Fernando parallels Don Quixote's own obsession — and then the disguised Dorothea, seduced and abandoned by the same Fernando. Dorothea volunteers to play Princess Micomicona, and the group successfully lures Don Quixote out of the mountains.
- Don Quixote explicitly deliberates between literary models for his penance — Orlando Furioso or Amadis of Gaul — revealing his life as a conscious performance of prior texts
- Cardenio's love-madness mirrors Don Quixote's own condition; both men have been unhinged by obsessions they cannot relinquish
- Dorothea improvises the Princess Micomicona fiction on the spot, citing her familiarity with chivalric romances
- Sancho's fabricated account of delivering letters to Dulcinea — describing her winnowing wheat and smelling of sweat — is accepted by Don Quixote, who reinterprets every mundane detail through courtly-love imagery
▸Part I, Chapters XXXIII–XLI: The Inn — Interpolated Tales404
At the inn that reunites all the love-plot protagonists, the curate reads aloud the interpolated novel of the Ill-Advised Curiosity — Anselmo's self-destructive desire to test his wife Camilla's virtue, which ends in the ruin of all three principals. Don Quixote in his sleep slashes wine-skins imagining the giant. The captive's tale follows: based on Cervantes's own Algerian captivity, it narrates the soldier Ruy Perez's escape from Algiers with the convert Zoraida, and ends in the recognition of his long-lost brother, the Judge.
- Anselmo's ill-advised curiosity — the desire to test a virtue already possessed — is the central moral paradox of the interpolated tale; his dying note ('A foolish and ill-advised desire has robbed me of life') is its moral epitaph
- Don Quixote's wine-skin battle is a vivid comic juxtaposition with the tragic story being read aloud simultaneously
- The captive's narrative draws on Cervantes's five years as an Algerian prisoner and includes a covert self-portrait ('a Spanish soldier, something de Saavedra by name')
- Zoraida / María embodies the tension between Moorish identity and Christian conversion, functioning as both moral and financial engine of the escape
▸Part I, Chapters XLII–LII: The Inn Concluded — Enchantment and Return Home520
The inn assembles all strands: the captive's reunion with his brother the Judge, the secondary love-plot of Don Luis and Doña Clara, the mock tribunal over Mambrino's helmet, a brawl with Holy Brotherhood officers, and Don Quixote's caging by the curate and barber. He is carried home on an ox-cart, accepting the cage as enchantment. Part I ends with his return, followed by parodic academic epitaphs.
- The canon of Toledo delivers a sustained critique of chivalry romances as violations of verisimilitude — widely read as Cervantes's own novelistic credo
- Don Quixote is seized and caged in his sleep; he accepts this as modern enchantment and is released briefly on his knightly word
- Sancho's practical argument that enchanted beings do not eat, drink, or have bodily needs fails to shake his master's convictions
- The parodic Argamasilla epitaphs that close Part I announce Cervantes's self-conscious metafictional frame
▸Part II Dedication, Preface, and Chapters I–VII: Recovery, Fame, and the Third Sally625
Cervantes dedicates Part II as a refutation of Avellaneda's spurious continuation and commits to ending Don Quixote definitively. A month after his return, Don Quixote appears apparently sane until any mention of chivalry exposes his continuing madness. Bachelor Samson Carrasco brings the bombshell news that a printed history of Don Quixote already exists. The characters discuss their own narrative and its errors, and the pair depart again in secret.
- The revelation that a printed history exists creates a dizzying metafictional moment: the characters learn they are already characters in a book
- Don Quixote distinguishes the poet's duty (to write things as they should be) from the historian's duty (to write things as they were), while himself confusing fiction and history throughout
- Samson Carrasco's apparent enthusiasm for the third sally is secretly a plan to defeat Don Quixote in combat and force him home — a plan that will fail at first
- Don Quixote admits for the first time that he has never actually seen Dulcinea, establishing her as entirely an imaginative construction
▸Part II, Chapters X–XVIII: Dulcinea Enchanted — the Knight of the Mirrors and Don Diego702
Dispatched to find Dulcinea, Sancho invents an impromptu enchantment, presenting three peasant girls as Dulcinea and her damsels; Don Quixote accepts the delusion. They encounter actors on their way to a Corpus Christi performance, then meet the Knight of the Mirrors — actually Samson Carrasco in disguise — who claims to have already defeated Don Quixote. Don Quixote defeats him instead, and his enchantment-logic prevents him from recognising Carrasco's face. They then spend four days as guests of Don Diego de Miranda, the 'Knight of the Green Gaban,' and Don Quixote challenges a real lion with genuine courage.
- The enchantment of Dulcinea originates not with supernatural forces but with Sancho's practical lie — the central irony sustained across all of Part II
- Samson Carrasco's defeat transforms a charitable project into a vendetta, setting up his later return as the Knight of the White Moon
- Don Quixote's lion adventure is his supreme act of real bravery: unlike windmills or sheep, here the danger is genuine, and his definition of valour as the mean between cowardice and temerity is his most articulate self-defence
- Don Lorenzo's verdict — 'a madman full of streaks, full of lucid intervals' — is perhaps the most precise formulation of the protagonist's paradoxical nature in the entire novel
▸Part II, Chapters XIX–XXIX: Camacho's Wedding, the Cave of Montesinos, and the Puppet Show782
Don Quixote and Sancho witness Basilio's brilliant trick to win Quiteria from the wealthy Camacho. Don Quixote is then lowered into the Cave of Montesinos, where he claims to spend three days in an enchanted underground realm populated by Carolingian heroes and the enchanted Dulcinea — but is drawn up after barely an hour. The narrator Cide Hamete labels the episode 'apocryphal.' After the divining ape of Master Pedro (revealed as Ginés de Pasamonte in disguise), Don Quixote destroys a puppet show by attacking its Moorish puppet villains as though they were real, and drifts down the Ebro in an enchanted bark that is simply an untied fishing boat.
- The Cave of Montesinos is the novel's most radical suspension of the boundary between dream, delusion, and possible truth; Cide Hamete himself cannot affirm or deny it
- Master Pedro's ape gives an equivocal verdict on the cave — 'part true, part false' — sustaining the narrative's deliberate ambiguity
- Don Quixote's destruction of the puppet show is the clearest illustration of his inability to distinguish theatrical representation from reality
- The enchantment-explanatory system is fully closed: every disconfirming event is absorbed as proof of rival enchanters working at cross-purposes
▸Part II, Chapters XXX–XLIV: The Duke and Duchess — Court Theatre884
The Duke and Duchess, having read Part I, receive Don Quixote and Sancho with full chivalric ceremony and stage an elaborate series of theatrical adventures — the Merlin decree requiring Sancho's 3,300 self-administered lashes to disenchant Dulcinea, the Distressed Duenna Trifaldi, and the wooden flying horse Clavileño. For the first time Don Quixote 'thoroughly feels himself a knight-errant in reality.' A resident churchman delivers the most direct and sustained rational attack on Don Quixote's madness in the novel. Don Quixote delivers a deeply wise set of governance counsels to Sancho before his departure.
- The Duke and Duchess are the first characters to know Don Quixote through the printed book, collapsing the boundary between the novel and its own readership
- The theatricality of the aristocratic court makes the staged adventures more 'real' to Don Quixote than anything he has encountered — because they perfectly mirror his reading
- Don Quixote's counsels to Sancho on governance — fear God, know yourself, let the tears of the poor find compassion but not more justice than the rich — represent his most lucid and genuinely wise utterances
- Cide Hamete remarks that the duke and duchess are scarcely two fingers' breadth saner than their victims, delivering a rare moral judgment from the narrator
▸Part II, Chapters XLV–LV: Sancho Governs Barataria1002
Sancho is installed as governor of the mock-island Barataria and immediately demonstrates surprising shrewdness in settling legal disputes — the hidden-crowns debt, the false rape allegation, the gallows paradox. He applies the principle that in cases of equal doubt, mercy should prevail. Tormented by a physician who removes every dish as harmful to health, and finally overwhelmed by a staged military alarm, Sancho resigns on the seventh day, leaving as poor and honest as he arrived. On the road home he encounters the expelled Morisco Ricote and falls into a pit from which Don Quixote rescues him.
- Sancho's judgments — the hollow walking-stick, the false rape claim, the gallows paradox — are repeatedly Solomonic in their practical intuition
- Doctor Pedro Recio satirises the type of credentialled professional whose care actively harms; Sancho names him the real assassin the duke's warning letter foretold
- Sancho's farewell speech — 'Naked I was born, naked I find myself, I neither lose nor gain' — is his defining statement of personal integrity
- Ricote's account of the Morisco expulsion gives voice to historical suffering: 'Wherever we are we weep for Spain; for after all we were born there and it is our natural fatherland'
- The majordomo acknowledges that the jokes have been turned upon the duke: 'jokers find the tables turned upon them'
▸Part II, Chapters LVI–LXVI: Barcelona — Defeat and the Road Home1102
Leaving the castle, Don Quixote delivers his great speech on freedom. After adventures including the bull-stampede, overhearing critics of Avellaneda's spurious sequel, and meeting the outlaw Roque Guinart, he enters Barcelona ceremonially. In the city he encounters the enchanted bronze speaking head, visits a printing office where he finds and condemns Avellaneda's book, and witnesses the rescue of Ana Felix. On the beach, the Knight of the White Moon — Samson Carrasco at last successful — defeats him; pinned under the lance, Don Quixote refuses to deny Dulcinea's beauty and accepts a year's retirement rather than dishonour her.
- Don Quixote's speech on freedom — 'Freedom, Sancho, is one of the most precious gifts that heaven has bestowed upon men' — is one of the most celebrated passages in Spanish literature
- He redirects the plot of his own life to skip Saragossa and go to Barcelona, to expose the rival book's false account of his presence there — a metafictional act in which he is an agent in his own literary defence
- Even prostrate under the lance, Don Quixote refuses to deny Dulcinea; his 'madness' is revealed as an act of absolute, voluntary fidelity to a self-chosen ideal
- Don Antonio's protest to Carrasco — 'may God forgive you the wrong you have done the whole world' — crystallises the novel's central moral paradox about the cost of curing a benevolent madness
▸Part II, Chapters LXVII–LXXIV: The Return Home and Death1205
Defeated and obligated by his vow to retire, Don Quixote proposes the pastoral life as a substitute fantasy. A pig-stampede, another visit to the duke's castle, Sancho's mercenary whipping of trees to complete Dulcinea's lash-count, and the formal legal repudiation of Avellaneda's impostor Don Quixote by a character extracted from that very book mark the homeward journey. On arriving in his village, Don Quixote takes omens ill. A six-day fever settles on him; he wakes with reason restored, rejects the name of Don Quixote, reclaims his birth name Alonso Quixano the Good, and dies calmly surrounded by weeping friends while Sancho begs him to live.
- Don Quixote's deathbed lucidity — 'my reason is now free and clear, rid of the dark shadows of ignorance that my unhappy constant study of those detestable books of chivalry cast over it' — is the moral climax of the novel
- His only regret is that recovery came too late to permit better reading, a deeply humanist final reckoning
- Sancho's tearful plea — 'don't die, master; take my advice and live many years' — is simultaneously comic and heartbreaking, the squire's truest expression of love
- Cide Hamete's address to his pen — 'For me alone was Don Quixote born, and I for him' — is Cervantes's final declaration of sole authorship and his farewell condemnation of the chivalry books
- The notary observes that Don Quixote is the only knight-errant in all the books who died peacefully in his bed, like a good Christian
Overview
Don Quixote (Part I, 1605; Part II, 1615) is the founding novel of the Western literary tradition and one of the most widely read books ever written. Its hero is an ageing, impoverished gentleman of La Mancha whose mind has been overthrown by excessive reading of the chivalric romances then flooding the Spanish press. Renaming himself Don Quixote, arming himself in rusted ancestral plate, mounting a swaybacked horse he calls Rocinante, and elevating a local farm girl into the ideal lady Dulcinea del Toboso, he sallies forth three times to live out the role of knight-errant in a prosaic seventeenth-century world that has no use for such figures. He is accompanied from the second sally onward by the earthy peasant Sancho Panza, lured into service as squire by the promise of governing an island. The comedy arises from the systematic collision between Don Quixote's chivalric imagination and plain reality — windmills become giants, inns become castles, flocks of sheep become armies — while Cervantes narrates every absurdity with deadpan gravity, never winking at the reader.
Cervantes frames the entire narrative as a translation from an Arabic manuscript by the fictional historian Cid Hamete Benengeli, a device borrowed from the very romances being mocked. This layered authorship — Benengeli writes, a Morisco translates, a Spanish narrator comments — gives the novel an ironic double structure that allows constant authorial self-questioning. Part I contains numerous interpolated tales: the pastoral tragedy of Chrysostom and Marcela, the interlocking love plots of Cardenio, Luscinda, Fernando, and Dorothea, the inn-novel of the Ill-Advised Curiosity, and the long-embedded captive's tale drawn from Cervantes's own years as a prisoner in Algiers. In Part II, published ten years later and goaded into existence by an unauthorized sequel, Don Quixote and Sancho are recognizably older and deeper; the characters learn that a printed history of their adventures already exists, and this metafictional awareness reshapes the action throughout. The Duke and Duchess, having read Part I, stage elaborate theatrical chivalric adventures for their own entertainment, using the knight and his squire as unwitting actors. Sancho briefly governs the mock-island of Barataria with surprising wisdom. Don Quixote is finally defeated on the beach at Barcelona by Samson Carrasco disguised as the Knight of the White Moon.
Beneath its inexhaustible comedy, the novel is a profound philosophical inquiry into the nature of reality, perception, and identity. Don Quixote's madness is precisely circumscribed: on every subject except chivalry he shows lucid, generous, and genuinely wise understanding; his madness is a total commitment to a chosen ideal rather than an intellectual defect. Sancho evolves in parallel, beginning as a greedy, credulous peasant and gradually becoming something close to a moral companion, whose earthly common sense and gift for native eloquence — his praise of sleep, his improvised personification of Death, his dignified resignation from Barataria — repeatedly confound the hierarchy of wisdom and foolishness. The novel repeatedly asks which is worse: Don Quixote's involuntary enchantment by books, or the deliberate cynicism of those sane people who stage false adventures for entertainment.
The book's extraordinary longevity rests on several incompatible pleasures held in suspension: broad physical farce and exact psychological portraiture; popular picaresque incident and Renaissance humanist debate; parody of a dead genre and creation of a living one. Its famous translator John Ormsby identified Cervantes's unsmiling gravity — the technique of recounting the most absurd events with complete deadpan seriousness — as the defining quality that all flippant renderings destroy. Don Quixote's death, which Cervantes wrote to prevent further spurious continuations, achieves a pathos no satirical scheme should be capable of producing: the old man recovers his sanity on his deathbed, rejects the name of Don Quixote, reclaims his birth name Alonso Quixano the Good, and grieves only that his recovery has come too late to permit better reading.
Don Quixote endures because it holds an unresolvable paradox at its centre without resolving it: the man who lives entirely by an invented ideal is simultaneously the most ridiculous and the most admirable figure in the book. Every character who mocks him is diminished by the comparison; every character who pities him eventually finds that pity becoming something closer to love. Cervantes's deepest insight — stated nowhere directly but embodied in every episode — is that the capacity to commit absolutely to a self-chosen vision of the good, however absurd its expression, is a form of greatness, and that a world without such people would be poorer in ways no census can capture. The novel's biggest single takeaway is that imagination and reality are not simply opposed but mutually constitutive: Don Quixote's delusions shape the world around him as surely as the world defeats them, and the reader who finishes the book cannot quite return to the certainty that seeing things plainly is always superior to seeing them as they ought to be.
Key Concepts
Books of chivalry as the source of madness p.50
The popular prose romances — Amadis of Gaul, Palmerin, and dozens of others — whose excessive reading destroys the gentleman's ability to distinguish fiction from reality and impels him to imitate their heroes literally. Cervantes's stated and reiterated purpose is to discredit and destroy their cultural authority.
Cid Hamete Benengeli and the found-manuscript device p.139
Cervantes frames the entire narrative as a translation from an Arabic history by a fictitious Arab historian, purchased as pamphlets in Toledo. This creates an ironic double-author structure that allows the narrator to question, praise, and distance himself from the story he is telling, and makes the novel one of the first works of sustained metafiction.
Quixotic incongruity — imagination versus reality p.58
The structural comic device on which the book is built: the systematic collision between Don Quixote's chivalric imagination and the prosaic reality of La Mancha — windmills taken for giants, inns for castles, farm girls for princesses. The incongruity is rooted in the deliberately unheroic character of La Mancha, which makes every romantic delusion instantly ludicrous by contrast with actual surroundings.
The enchanter as explanatory system p.220
Don Quixote's persistent resort to a malicious enchanter who transforms his surroundings to explain every discrepancy between his expectations and reality. The system is self-sealing: any counter-evidence becomes proof that enchanters have altered appearances, making his worldview unfalsifiable.
The enchantment of Dulcinea and Sancho's complicity p.709
The fiction, originating in Sancho's improvised lie in Part II Chapter X, that malicious enchanters have transformed the perfect Dulcinea into a coarse peasant girl. Don Quixote adopts this to reconcile his ideal with what his eyes see. It becomes the dominant plot obsession of Part II, reducible to absurdity when Sancho monetises the 3,300-lash cure and whips trees instead of himself.
Metafiction — characters who know they are in a book p.648
From Part II Chapter II onward, the characters learn that a printed history of their adventures exists, written by the Moorish author Cid Hamete Benengeli. The Duke and Duchess have read it and stage adventures accordingly. Don Quixote redirects the plot of his own life to refute a rival author. This self-referential layering — characters shaped by awareness of their own narrative — is one of Cervantes's most radical innovations.
Sancho's natural wisdom and governance p.1006
Despite illiteracy and peasant origins, Sancho repeatedly produces Solomonic judgments (the hollow cane, the gallows paradox, the false rape claim) driven by practical intuition rather than book learning. His brief governorship of Barataria, though a staged joke, reveals genuine political talent and personal integrity, and his 'constitutions' are said by the narrator to have survived to his day.
Freedom as the supreme human good p.1114
Don Quixote's speech upon leaving the duke's castle argues that freedom surpasses all earthly treasure and that accepting gifts creates spiritual bondage. The passage is one of the most explicit statements of individual autonomy in early modern European literature and encodes the novel's implicit critique of the aristocratic entertainment economy.
Unsmiling gravity — Cervantes's comic technique p.60
The narrative technique, identified by translator John Ormsby as the defining quality of Cervantes's humour, of recounting the most absurd events with deadpan matter-of-factness and apparent unconsciousness that anything comic is happening. Flippant translations destroy the book by substituting visible authorial winking for this invisibility.
Virtue over blood — the meritocratic ideal p.981
Don Quixote's recurring counsel, most fully articulated in his advice to Sancho before Barataria, that true nobility is grounded in virtue and conduct, not lineage: 'blood is an inheritance, but virtue an acquisition.' The idea encodes the novel's implicit social critique and frames Sancho's governance as a test of whether natural worth can transcend social station.
Themes
Imagination versus realityThe transformative and destructive power of readingIdealism colliding with a prosaic worldIdentity, role-playing, and performed selfhoodThe wisdom of apparent follyLoyalty, friendship, and the master–servant bondSocial class, honour, and human dignityMetafiction and the nature of narrative truthFreedom as the supreme human goodThe relationship between fiction and history
Notable Passages
Freedom, Sancho, is one of the most precious gifts that heaven has bestowed upon men; no treasures that the earth holds buried or the sea conceals can compare with it; for freedom, as for honour, life may and should be ventured.
Dulcinea del Toboso is the fairest woman in the world, and I the most unfortunate knight on earth; it is not fitting that this truth should suffer by my feebleness; drive your lance home, sir knight, and take my life, since you have taken away my honour.
My reason is now free and clear, rid of the dark shadows of ignorance that my unhappy constant study of those detestable books of chivalry cast over it. Now I see through their absurdities and deceptions, and it only grieves me that this destruction of my illusions has come so late that it leaves me no time to make some amends by reading other books that might be a light to my soul.
For me alone was Don Quixote born, and I for him; it was his to act, mine to write; we two together make but one, notwithstanding and in spite of that pretended Tordesillesque writer who has ventured or would venture with his great, coarse, ill-trimmed ostrich quill to write the achievements of my valiant knight.
How to Read This
Read Part I and Part II in sequence; they are written ten years apart and the tonal shift is meaningful — Part I is looser and more episodic, Part II denser and more self-aware. The interpolated tales in Part I (Chapters XXXIII–XLI especially) can be read quickly on a first pass; the embedded captive's tale repays close attention for its autobiographical weight. The chapters treating Sancho's governance of Barataria (Part II, Chapters XLV–LV) and Don Quixote's final homecoming and death (Chapters LXXIII–LXXIV) deserve particular slowness — they are where the comedy and pathos become inseparable and where the novel achieves its full moral depth.