The Duality of Truth in Don Quixote by Miguel Cervantes Essay

Lazarillo de Tormes is a famous work of Spanish literature published anonymously. The novel is written in the first person. Lazarillo de Tormes is known as a picaresque novel in that the novel is written about a character of the lower-class instead of a hero or upper-class character. The novel has several themes, but the theme that is constant throughout the novel is appearance versus reality. A rhetorical device is a use of language that is intended to have an effect on its audience. The author utilizes several rhetorical devices in the novel which add emphasis to the story. For the purposes of this paper, the following rhetorical devices are analyzed: satire, simile, hyperbole, double entendre and parody. The novel, which was banned by the Spanish Crown during the time of the Spanish inquisition, is the story of the birth and life Lazarillo as he serves various masters and his struggle for survival. His struggle is real. Many of the rhetorical devices serve to add humor to the novel as well.

Opinion: “Opinions are intensely personal, so it is understandable that people have strong feelings about theirs. (Ruggiero, 2010, p.34). Your opinion may not be the truth but for an individual it is a personal view and not any one else’s.

Socrates in using statues of Daedalus as an example discuses a relationship between opinions that happen to be true and actual knowledge or hard facts. Socrates’ point is that opinions can be decided by countless questionable factors and can heavily vary from moment to moment and go in unpredictable directions if they are not held in place. Opinions are perceptions of the world and it is possible that some align with how the world really is but often times it is quite removed from reality and therefore an ignoble outlook to see the world through. The opinions of a person, particularly uneducated and foolish opinions that are have little relation to the truth should not be respected and can be dangerous. A person may be of the opinion that the moon is hollow or is a projection made to fool the people of the world, and most would not consider this to be in any way a fact nor would they consider the person claiming this to be worth listening to besides for amusement.

Depicted on the cover of Quixote’s Soldiers is a group of Mexican- American men and women in protest formation. They carry with them signs that say “Justice for La Raza,” “Ando sangrando igual que tu,” and “Cops out of our communities!” David Montejano argues that Mexican- American reform groups are often left out of the Civil Rights Movement taught in a classroom. San Antonio was the birthplace of the Chicano movement. Here, various organizations were formed to encourage the government to increase Mexican- Americans opportunities in the educational field as well as in the work field. The Brown Power movement campaigned for Mexican- Americans to reject assimilation into the American mainstream society, and celebrate their Chicano history.

In this essay I am going to discuss whether or not we can consider Lazarillo de Tormes as a subversive text and the reasons behind why or why not we may believe it to be so. To accomplish this, I will explore the background behind Lazarillo, the different methods and literary devices used to convey dual meaning and give the text an undertone of subversion.

Christianity teaches that in order to be able to truly serve God, one must give up worldly pleasures, which are deemed selfish. Throughout literature, many authors touch on this subject, some in very direct manners. Such is the case in Cervantes’ Don Quixote and St. Augustine’s Confessions. In excerpts from each, the narrator describes how he had undergone a change from relishing in worldly and selfish activities to renouncing such immoral pleasures in order to follow the moral path to God. As each passage progresses, the narrator tells of his past and his new thinking in the present, and ends by praising God for His mercy. Throughout the passages, several dichotomies exist

Instead of leading people to likewise question the immortality of life, he instead uses his authority so that the townspeople of Valverde de Lucerna never question life after death. While this consoles both Don Manuel and the townspeople, it is ultimately a false freedom. The people are trapped within the freedom of an earthly life, cannot rebel against the Church authority, and have a concept of faith that rests on outward appearances and comfort rather than truth. However, this is in direct contrast with how Unamuno himself lived his life. Unamuno often used socialist tactics to bring the people in “his town” of Salamanca to consider life after death (Nozick 25).

Well, he believes that if he were to set off on a great and grand adventure, where he would come back as the greatest hero, there would be no way for the woman of his dreams, Dulcinea, to reject him once more. He is a man who is quite fond of fantasies and since life is looking down on him after the rejection, he will want to do whatever it takes to turn his story around. So, he is able to take one of his only friends, Sancho, on this journey that would allow them both to end up as great men. Sancho is a complex character with many sides, unlike Quixote, he only lies when he has to. Nevertheless, he would do anything to get his, “princess or a great lady”(pg. 2367) to either fall for him, or at least make it to where she regrets her sin of leading him on as he states.

A role of Don Quixote’s delusions is to provide a glimpse into a situation where the chivalric code is implemented. Don Quixote is mad at first glance:

In Turgenev’s “Hamlet and Don Quixote”, the author separates individuals into two different classifications. The first class, the Hamlets, are the individuals who think “analytic, rational, self-reflective, and self-interested” (1). While the second class or the Don Quixotes, are individuals depicted as someone who will miscalculate, are irrational, and lack a sense of realism. The most important aspect of this critical essay is that Turgenev clearly favors the Don Quixotes, even going so far as to say “it is the Don Quixotes who are life-sustaining, not the Hamlets” (1). No matter how surprising this statement is Turgenev then explains that society does not even have to believe in one signal belief, but everyone beliefs in something. Turgenev’s

Don Quixote chose to be a knight errant to help others, to live an adventurous life and to achieve fame. Throughout the book Don Quixote has trouble adapting his vision to his environment and circumstances. He pretends the world is the same as the way it was described in the books of chivalry. Don Quixote seems completely insane; he fails to recognize people and objects compared to the books and real life.

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.

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,

conversion to the political theology of the Spanish State. We argued that the articulation of forced conversion as a paramount goal of the State’s ontological aspirations relies upon a misunderstanding apropos of the alleged divine performativity of the Law. We then moved to The Turn and analysed the literary sublimation that Cervantes operates in Don Quixote I-II apropos of the aforementioned political reality. In particular, we focused on the way Cervantes’s ingenium relies upon the trope of conversion (literary sense) and on how its deployment helped Cervantes circumvent the inquisitorial censorship while suspending the reader’s belief in the State’s ontological tendency (and by extension, in forced conversion as the crowning policy of that ambition). As part of this task, we analyzed a multiplicity of semantic (featuring a symbolism linked to the countryside, the military, the economic, the religious, the political, the professional fields, to name but a few) and non-semantic displacements (related to the materiality of language as such) across forms (novel and theatre, but also poetry) and genres (epic, comedy, tragedy, tragicomedy, realistic fiction, romance and satire)iv. After The Pledge and The Turn it is now time for us to ask ourselves the following question: for all this string of ecstatic conversions, wherein, though, resides The Prestige of Cervantes as instantiated in Don Quixote Parts I-II?

When Archimago gives the knight erotic dreams of Una, the false image of her, drives him to leave the real Una; he is a representation of the