Don Quixote Essay

In the world of literature, there are many great world that blow the minds of readers and historians everywhere. However none of these works of literature have caused a great effect in the world quite like Don Quixote De La Mancha, a novel written by Miguel de Cervantes in the 1600s.

The novel Don Quixote, written by Miguel de Cervantes, is a very unusual and very descriptive novel about an older gentleman, Don Quixote, who reads so many books that one day after reading so many books, he decides to live out his adventures from his books. When reading this story, many will just see a crazy and delusional old man who is “chasing windmills” for he sees them as giants he must conquor. However, I see a much different kind of delusion that Quixote is going through; which not only make him the protagonist of the story, but he also becomes the hero, even if it is in his own mind. Also within this humouros novel, Cervantes invokes so much more meaning to this story in an underlying fashion.

Spain at the time was caught in the tumult of a new age, and Cervantes tried to create in Don Quixote a place to discuss human identity, morality, and art within this ever-shifting time. Though the Renaissance gave rise to a new humanism in European literature, popular writing continued to be dominated by romances about knights in shining armor practicing the code of chivalry. Chivalry emphasized the protection of the weak, idealized women, and celebrated the role of the wandering knight, who traveled from place to place performing good deeds. Books of chivalry tended to contain melodramatic, fantastical stories about encounters with cruel giants, rescues of princesses in distress, and battles with evil enchanters—highly stylized accounts of shallow characters playing out age-old

Chivalry, according to dictionary.com, is the sum of the ideal qualifications of a Knight, this includes: courtesy, generosity, valor, and dexterity in arms. Don Quixote believes that by bringing these qualities back into society, the world will once again obtain its beauty. On this journey, Don Quixote is accompanied by a peasant laborer, Sancho Panza, who Don Quixote refers to as his squire. Sancho, takes the roll of Don Quixote’s squire because of greed. Unlike the other characters in this novel, Sancho admires Don Quixote’s madness, even getting himself wrapped along in it at times.

The classic Spanish novel, Don Quixote, is an amusing and adventurous tale written by Miguel de Cervantes. Don Quixote is an aspiring knight errant who dreams of completing deeds similar to the characters in his romance novels. This story is an amusing and adventurous tale with creative plot and characters.

A writer, no matter how great, no matter how brilliant his work, does not exhaust the literary wealth of a nation in a given era, but with all your heritage or just one of his work, he can score the highest peaks of the literature. Based on merit and dignity Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra takes the first place in the literature of the Spanish Renaissance, because most profound and extraordinary artistic force reflected the spirit and meaning of his time. In an ingenious unique way, it has revealed the battle between old and new in its era from the standpoint of humanism. In the history of world literature Cervantes is known primarily as the author of the novel "Don Quixote".

Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote is grounded in past records on a figure by the name Don Quixote. While it is unclear from the text itself to what degree Cervantes had embellished the so-called history, it is certain by his own admittance that the work is “inventive” (Cervantes, 446). From this it is immediately apparent that it is not truthfully a history in an Aristotelian sense. Yet still it maintains that grounding in reality, and to call Cervantes’ Don Quixote a “truthful history” is perfectly sound, for sufficiently relaxed definitions of truthfulness and history. Two opposing approaches to what is permitted in a work called a history can be found from Aristotle, particularly in his Poetics, and from Tagore’s The Ramayana.

Don Quixote lives in a world entirely of his imagination. His mind creates explanations for the many real-world situations that challenge his alternate reality. He believes himself a courtly knight, on quests of honor and justice. In one instance, Quixote comes to a field of windmills, but in need of a new adventure, tells his squire, “you see there before you, friend Sancho Panza, some thirty or more lawless giants with whom I mean to do battle” (Cervantes 413). Looking to secure justice for those under his protection, Quixote demands the release of a group of slaves being

Traditionally 16th -century love was depicted as Chivalry Romance. This means that it was to be arranged marriages between those of equal status or class as the norm. Back then love was seen as a perfect and pure concept. Cervantes did not agree with this and challenged and mocked it in his writings. As stated by Maynard Mack in his book, World Masterpieces, “ The actual method [Cervantes] followed in order to expose the silliness of the romances of chivalry was to show to what extraordinary consequences they would lead a man insanely infatuated in them..”. Due to this type of thinking, Cervantes in his novel, Don Quixote, portrays love in a nontraditional way, as a mysterious force that draws lovers together.

They get on a boat, and don’t go very far. Don Quixote believes they have travelled two thousand miles. The boat reaches some mills. The owner of the boat appear and Don Quixote pays him. They find a Duchess and a Duke hunting. Sancho goes to talk to the Duchess and she welcomes him, as she has read the first part of the book. Don Quixote and Sancho ride with them to their castle. Don Quixote believes the Duke is a knight-errant. When they have Dinner the Duke forces Don Quixote to sit at the head of the table. The duchess takes a particular liking to Sancho for embarrassing his master with his silliness. The servants wash Don Quixote’s head and pretend to run out of water. The Duke forces them to wash his head the same way so he does not get

Sancho tells Don Quixote that since enchanted people have no bodily needs, Don Quixote’s need to use the bathroom proves that he is not enchanted. Don Quixote responds that there are new kinds of enchantment but promises to try to free himself. When the party stops for lunch, the priest lets Don Quixote out of the cage, and he and the canon argue about chivalry. The canon emphasizes that Don Quixote mingles fact and fiction with no concern for the difference. Don Quixote tells the story of the Knight of the Lake, a fantasy story of enchantment that, he claims, proves the delightful and fascinating nature of stories of knight-errantry. Don Quixote also tells the canon that since becoming a knight-errant he himself has been brave, courteous,

Don Quixote’s reality was so clouded by the tales of knights that he saw windmills as “thirty or more enormous giants with whom,” he was going to battle (Cervantes 58). In attempts of imitating the knights of fiction, Don Quixote was far too serious in every case along the journey. He scolded Sancho and said to him, “well, you may be joking, but I am not,” (150). It proves that Don Quixote does not intend to play or joke around, that being a knight errant truly was business and only business. Even though Don Quixote is delusional and insane, he often demonstrates his intelligence by either reciting all the books he knows and has read or even better, showing us what intelligence his brain had before it was saturated by tales of chivalry.

The master-servant relationship between Sancho and Quixote in Cervantes’ Don Quixote reveals the synthesis of both chivalric and picaresque elements in the story. The picaresque perspective is visible in Don Quixote when comparing it to Lazarillo De Tormes. The adversity of the underdog Lazaro and his various masters reveal the foibles of human-makeup due to society’s harshness. Beyond the face-level meaning, the underlying depiction of Spanish society is hidden by the authors through the master-servant relationship alongside foodstuffs, and¬ cultural conflicts due to social hierarchy and the revival of Old Christian ethics. Thus, we search beyond these points of companionship to determine if material conditions and social circumstances between

2 In this sense, the role of the pre-Cide Hamete deflationist character of Cervantes 's authorship of/in Don Quixote I-II as hinted at in the late stages of this prologue and subsequently throughout the book, is to be understood as part of his strategy to insists on the importance of linguistic self-awareness through the deployment of the self-reflective narrative technique, e.g. by warning us that the poems of praise featuring in his book are counterfeit, but including them nevertheless.

So much can happen over a period of 387 years. To name a few, the United States became a country, trains were invented, cars were invented, airplanes were invented, and the world experienced two world wars. Also during this period two people were born; Miguel de Cervantes and Luisa Valenzuela. Born in 1547, Cervantes would grow up to write one of the most renowned books of his time, Don Quixote. Don Quixote was first published in 1605 during the Renaissance. It is the story of Don Quixote de La Mancha, who is an average middle class, middle age man. Unlike most men of the Renaissance, Don Quixote still believes in Middle Age ideals, specifically chivalry. The book goes on to discuss Don Quixote’s ridiculous quest to become a knight errant