Don Quixote

Overview

Two books, published ten years apart, and they are not the same kind of book. Part One of 1605 is loose, episodic and full of interpolated stories, some of which have nothing to do with the main pair. It reads like a series of sketches around one joke: an old man who has read too much rides out expecting the world to behave like a romance, and gets beaten by it repeatedly. Part One was a hit, and a writer under the name Avellaneda published an unauthorised sequel. Cervantes responded in 1615 with a Part Two that is tighter, sadder, and stranger, in which the characters know they are famous and the forgery is discussed inside the plot.

There is also an elaborate game with the narration. Cervantes presents himself as the editor of a manuscript by an Arabic historian, Cide Hamete Benengeli, which he had translated by a boy in the Toledo market, and he periodically doubts his source. So no fact in the novel arrives unmediated. When you are told that Quixote saw giants, you are being told that a doubtful chronicler wrote that a translator rendered it so.

Length is the real obstacle. It is long, and Part One in particular has stretches where the pair vanish for fifty pages while somebody reads a novella aloud in an inn.

What happens

Part One. Alonso Quixano, a gentleman of about fifty, sells land to buy romances, stops sleeping, and decides to revive knight errantry. He cobbles together armour, renames his horse Rocinante and himself Don Quixote, invents a lady out of a neighbouring farm girl, and rides out. He is dubbed a knight by an innkeeper playing along, is thrashed for interfering with a farmer beating a boy, and comes home. His housekeeper, niece, the village priest and the barber burn most of his library and wall up the room.

He goes out again with Sancho Panza, who has been promised the governorship of an island. The famous episodes follow: the windmills, the flocks of sheep taken for armies, the barber’s basin worn as a helmet, the funeral procession, the galley slaves who repay their liberation with stones. In the Sierra Morena he does penance for Dulcinea while Sancho carries a letter to her. The priest and barber track him down, and the strands of runaway lovers gathered at the inn are sorted out while Quixote is tricked into a cage on an ox cart and taken home.

Part Two. A month later he sets out a third time, and now everyone he meets has read about him. Sancho, to get out of an awkward promise, tells him three peasant girls are Dulcinea and her ladies, and that she has been enchanted into ugliness. The rest of the book is shaped by that lie. A student called Sansón Carrasco dresses as a knight to defeat him and send him home, and loses. The Duke and Duchess take the pair into their household and stage increasingly elaborate entertainments, including a wooden flying horse and a fake Dulcinea who demands that Sancho be whipped to disenchant her. Sancho gets his island, judges cases well, is starved by his doctors, and quits after a week.

They go on to Barcelona, where Quixote sees the sea and a printer’s shop with the false sequel in it. Carrasco, in mirrored armour, beats him on the beach and imposes the condition that he go home and lay down arms for a year. He obeys, falls ill, wakes sane, renounces the books, makes a will, and dies. Cervantes ends by telling other writers to leave him alone.

How to read it

Read Part One for the comedy and do not feel obliged to read every interpolated tale. The Curious Impertinent in chapters 33 to 35 can be skipped on a first pass; the captive’s story in 39 to 41 is worth keeping, because it is close to Cervantes’ own life as a prisoner in Algiers.

Read Part Two much more slowly. Almost everything that makes the book great, the self-awareness, the tenderness between the two men, the growing cruelty of the people who find them entertaining, is concentrated there.

Watch Sancho. He begins as a greedy fool and ends as the most reliable judge in the novel, and the two of them exchange something over nine hundred pages. By Part Two, Sancho believes in Dulcinea more than his master does.

Notice who is laughing. In Part One, the world knocks Quixote down by accident. In Part Two, bored aristocrats do it on purpose and pay for the sets. Whether that is a joke on the knight or on his audience is the question the novel leaves you with.

Questions it raises

• Is Quixote mad, or has he chosen to act as though something were true? He gives up the fiction the moment he decides to.
• Does Sancho stay for the island, or for his master?
• Cervantes claims to be only the editor of a doubtful Arabic manuscript. What does the novel gain by never letting us see events directly?
• Part Two punishes the characters who stage adventures more than the man who imagines them. Why?
• What is the difference between Quixote’s romances and the novel you are holding?
• His last act is to renounce Don Quixote and die as Alonso Quixano. Is that a recovery or a defeat?