Cervantes, 1547 doğumlu, gemide çalışarak o dönemin modasına uyuyor ! Osmanlılarla savaşırken, Elhamra sarayını yapan Araplara satılıyor..1605 ilk kitabı, 1615 2.kitabı yazıyor. 2.kitabı yazmakta acele ettiğini söylüyor ancak aralarındaki geçen süre, acele etmesine rağmen 10 yıl ! Cervantes, iyi bir hristiyan, tutucu denilebilecek seviyede, esir düştüğü dönemlerde belki de(!) perçinlenmiştirJ
Don Kişot, İspanya’nın değişik bölgelerinde geçiyor, yazar bizi her seferinde o bölgenin özelliklerini de tanıtacak şekilde, farklı farklı bölgelere götürüyor. Rönesans a kadar kral/kraliçe kavramı varken, sonrasında “insan”, insan olma kavramı var. Bu nedenle 2.kitapta sancho bir anda daha farklı bir karakter olarak ortaya çıkıyor. Sancho nun bulunduğu sınıfa göre değerlendirmesi var, o dönemde hangi sınıftaysan, o sınıfa göre değerin var…
Sancho, olabilecek en iyi insan örneği..
Yazıldığı dönemin kitapları, soneler ve baladlarla süslenirdi. Don Kişot, soneler ve baladlar olmadan yazılan, döneme kıyasla çok yalın bir anlatım dili olan, çok farklı bir kitap..Sancho her şeyi 2 defa söylüyor, buradaki amaç, dönemin anlatım diline gönderme yapmak..
Sancho ve Don Kişot un birbirinden karşılıklı etkileşimi, etkileyici bir dille aktarılmış..sancho ve Don Kişot birbirlerini bütünlüyorlar..
Dulcinea, gerçek-hayal kontrastı..
Sözlü edebiyat; ne kadar çok kulaktan kulağa giderse o kadar değişir..
Cervantes, Don Kişot ile kendi kendini kandırıyor..
2.bölümde anlatımı ana kurallarını sorguluyor. Örneğin kusma hikayesi, sınıf farklı ile dalga geçmesi. Şovalye içiyor,ölmüyor ancak sancho aynı sınıftan değil, ya içip o ölürse.. Önyargılarımızla bizleri(okuyucuları da) de zorluyor..
Gerçek ve hayal farklı şeyler , Don Kişot, ilk anti kahraman ! ideallerle-gerçeklerin mücadelesi
Akla zarar bile olsa, hayallerinin peşinden gidiyor ! Döndüklerinde, Sancho, o hayallere, maceraya,özgürlüğe kapılıyor, bu nedenle yeniden kaçışına yardım ediyor..
Don kişot’un bakış açısıyla bakınca üzülmedim, çünkü o kendi hayallerini yaşıyor, mutlu..gerçek hayatın yaşanılası olmadığını düşünüyor ve ölüyor !...
Cervantes – Shakespeare aynı dönem..
Cesareti çok çarpıcı, aslan,yaban domuzu simgeleri..
Kendisi gibi bir şovalye söyleyince her şeyi bırakıyor ancak o gerçekleri sevmiyor..
Kerim Çetinoğlu çevirisini büyüklere, Reşat nuri Güntekin çevirisini de ilköğretimdeki arkadaşlarımıza tavsiye ediyoruz. Bu toplantıda 9 yaşında bir okuyucu da bizimle birlikteydi, bizi en etkileyen geribildirimi, Don Kişot’un kurduğu hayallerle mutlu olduğunun altını çizmesiydi…İspanyolların deyimi ile kimbilebilir * yeldeğirmenleri ile savaşmak demek zırhınla sırtüstü yere çakılmak olmayabilir, gökyüzünün derin maviliğine doğru da kanat açabilirsin…Hayallerinizle derinliklere uçmanız dileğiyle…o dönemden bir sone..
Kim mutluluğumu mahvetti ?
Kibir
Acılarımı çoğaltan nedir ?
Kıskançlık
Sabrımı tüketen nedir ?
Yoksulluk
Öyleyse bu derde, deva yok,
Umudumu yok edecek,
Kibir,kıskançlık ve yoksulluk
Bu acıyı kim çektirdi bana ?
Aşk
Kim istedi mutlu olmama mı ?
Kader
Kim istiyor acı çekmemi ?
Tanrı
Kaderim ölüm olacak sonunda..
Bu dertten, bu illetten öleceğim,
Aşk,Kader,Tanrı
Böyle istiyor çünkü..
M iguel de Cervantes Saavedra was born in 1547 to a poor Spanish doctor. He joined the army at twenty-one and fought against Turkey at sea and Italy on land. In 1575, pirates kidnapped Cervantes and his brother and sold them as slaves to the Moors, the longtime Muslim enemies of Catholic Spain. Cervantes ended up in Algiers. He attempted to escape his enslavement three times and was eventually ransomed in 1580 and returned to Spain. Only with the publication of the first volume of Don Quixote, in 1605, did Cervantes achieve financial success and popular renown. Don Quixote became an instant success, and its popularity even spawned an unauthorized sequel by a writer who used the name Avellaneda. This sequel appeared several years after the original volume, and it inspired Cervantes to hurry along his own second volume, which he published in 1615. Cervantes died later that year.
Many of Don Quixote’s recurring elements are drawn from Cervantes’s life: the presence of Algerian pirates on the Spanish coast, the exile of the enemy Moors, the frustrated prisoners whose failed escape attempts cost them dearly, the disheartening battles displaying Spanish courage in the face of plain defeat, and even the ruthless ruler of Algiers. Cervantes’s biases pervade the novel as well, most notably in the form of a mistrust of foreigners.
Funded by silver and gold pouring in from its American colonies, Spain was at the height of its European domination during Cervantes’s life. But Spain also suffered some of its most crippling defeats during this time, including the crushing of its seemingly invincible armada by the English in 1588. The tale of the captive, which begins in Chapter XXXIX of the First Part of Don Quixote, recounts in detail many of the historical battles in which Cervantes himself participated. In this sense, Don Quixote is very much a historical novel.
Nevertheless, the novel illustrates Spain’s divergent worlds. 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 dramas.
On one level, the first volume of Don Quixote is a parody of the romances of Cervantes’s time. Don Quixote rides out like any other knight-errant, searching for the same principles and goals and engaging in similar battles. During these battles, he invokes chivalric ideals, regardless of how ridiculous his adventures may be. On another level, however, the adventures of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza in the novel’s First Part attempt to describe a code of honor that could serve as an example for a Spain that was confused by war and by its own technological and social successes. Cervantes applies this code of values to a world in which such values are out of date.
In the Second Part, however, Cervantes provides the answer to questions about identity and codes of conduct in the personalities of Don Quixote and especially his sidekick, Sancho Panza. The Second Part is a textured work with responsive and credible characters who engage one another in sincere and meaningful ways. Cervantes wanted to place his novel within a literary tradition that was fluctuating at the time, and the novel’s numerous discussions of playwriting, poetry, and literature mark this effort to understand the changes in the intellectual environment.
Cervantes also includes social and religious commentary in Don Quixote. He bitterly criticizes the class structure in Spain, where outmoded concepts of nobility and property prevailed even as education became more widespread among the lower classes. The arrogance of the Duke and the Duchess in the Second Part highlights how unacceptable Cervantes found these class distinctions to be. Likewise, the prevailing of Sancho and Teresa Panza’s wisdom at the end of the novel is a victory for old-fashioned goodness and wisdom in the face of a world that makes people practical but petty. Finally, Cervantes, who was briefly excommunicated from the Catholic church in 1587, discusses the church in the novel as well. Sancho’s self-identification as an “old Christian,” in particular, informs the new morality he represents.
Plot Overview
D on Quixote is a middle-aged gentleman from the region of La Mancha in central Spain. Obsessed with the chivalrous ideals touted in books he has read, he decides to take up his lance and sword to defend the helpless and destroy the wicked. After a first failed adventure, he sets out on a second one with a somewhat befuddled laborer named Sancho Panza, whom he has persuaded to accompany him as his faithful squire. In return for Sancho’s services, Don Quixote promises to make Sancho the wealthy governor of an isle. On his horse, Rocinante, a barn nag well past his prime, Don Quixote rides the roads of Spain in search of glory and grand adventure. He gives up food, shelter, and comfort, all in the name of a peasant woman, Dulcinea del Toboso, whom he envisions as a princess
On his second expedition, Don Quixote becomes more of a bandit than a savior, stealing from and hurting baffled and justifiably angry citizens while acting out against what he perceives as threats to his knighthood or to the world. Don Quixote abandons a boy, leaving him in the hands of an evil farmer simply because the farmer swears an oath that he will not harm the boy. He steals a barber’s basin that he believes to be the mythic Mambrino’s helmet, and he becomes convinced of the healing powers of the Balsam of Fierbras, an elixir that makes him so ill that, by comparison, he later feels healed. Sancho stands by Don Quixote, often bearing the brunt of the punishments that arise from Don Quixote’s behavior.
The story of Don Quixote’s deeds includes the stories of those he meets on his journey. Don Quixote witnesses the funeral of a student who dies as a result of his love for a disdainful lady turned shepherdess. He frees a wicked and devious galley slave, Gines de Pasamonte, and unwittingly reunites two bereaved couples, Cardenio and Lucinda, and Ferdinand and Dorothea. Torn apart by Ferdinand’s treachery, the four lovers finally come together at an inn where Don Quixote sleeps, dreaming that he is battling a giant.
Along the way, the simple Sancho plays the straight man to Don Quixote, trying his best to correct his master’s outlandish fantasies. Two of Don Quixote’s friends, the priest and the barber, come to drag him home. Believing that he is under the force of an enchantment, he accompanies them, thus ending his second expedition and the First Part of the novel.
The Second Part of the novel begins with a passionate invective against a phony sequel of Don Quixote that was published in the interim between Cervantes’s two parts. Everywhere Don Quixote goes, his reputation—gleaned by others from both the real and the false versions of the story—precedes him.
As the two embark on their journey, Sancho lies to Don Quixote, telling him that an evil enchanter has transformed Dulcinea into a peasant girl. Undoing this enchantment, in which even Sancho comes to believe, becomes Don Quixote’s chief goal.
Don Quixote meets a Duke and Duchess who conspire to play tricks on him. They make a servant dress up as Merlin, for example, and tell Don Quixote that Dulcinea’s enchantment—which they know to be a hoax—can be undone only if Sancho whips himself 3,300 times on his naked backside. Under the watch of the Duke and Duchess, Don Quixote and Sancho undertake several adventures. They set out on a flying wooden horse, hoping to slay a giant who has turned a princess and her lover into metal figurines and bearded the princess’s female servants.
During his stay with the Duke, Sancho becomes governor of a fictitious isle. He rules for ten days until he is wounded in an onslaught the Duke and Duchess sponsor for their entertainment. Sancho reasons that it is better to be a happy laborer than a miserable governor.
A young maid at the Duchess’s home falls in love with Don Quixote, but he remains a staunch worshipper of Dulcinea. Their never-consummated affair amuses the court to no end. Finally, Don Quixote sets out again on his journey, but his demise comes quickly. Shortly after his arrival in Barcelona, the Knight of the White Moon—actually an old friend in disguise—vanquishes him.
Cervantes relates the story of Don Quixote as a history, which he claims he has translated from a manuscript written by a Moor named Cide Hamete Benengeli. Cervantes becomes a party to his own fiction, even allowing Sancho and Don Quixote to modify their own histories and comment negatively upon the false history published in their names.
In the end, the beaten and battered Don Quixote forswears all the chivalric truths he followed so fervently and dies from a fever. With his death, knights-errant become extinct. Benengeli returns at the end of the novel to tell us that illustrating the demise of chivalry was his main purpose in writing the history of Don Quixote.
Don Quixote de la Mancha
The title character of the novel, Don Quixote is a gaunt, middle-aged gentleman who, having gone mad from reading too many books about chivalrous knights, determines to set off on a great adventure to win honor and glory in the name of his invented ladylove, Dulcinea. Don Quixote longs for a sense of purpose and beauty—two things he believes the world lacks—and hopes to bring order to a tumultuous world by reinstating the chivalric code of the knights-errant. Initially, Don Qui-xote’s good intentions do only harm to those he meets, since he is largely unable to see the world as it really is.
As the novel progresses, Don Quixote, with the help of his faithful squire Sancho, slowly distinguishes between reality and the pictures in his head. Nonetheless, until his final sanity-inducing illness, he remains true to his chivalric conception of right and wrong. Even though his vision clears enough to reveal to him that the inns he sees are just inns, not castles as he previously believed, he never gives up on his absolute conviction that Dulcinea can save him from all misfortune. Furthermore, even when Don Quixote must retire from knight-errantry, he does so in the spirit of knight-errantry, holding to his vows and accepting his retirement as part of the terms of his defeat at the hands of the Knight of the White Moon. Despite his delusions, however, Don Quixote is fiercely intelligent and, at times, seemingly sane. He cogently and concisely talks about literature, soldiering, and government, among other topics.
No single analysis of Don Quixote’s character can adequately explain the split between his madness and his sanity. He remains a puzzle throughout the novel, a character with whom we may have difficulty identifying and sympathizing. We may see Don Quixote as coy and think that he really does know what is going on around him and that he merely chooses to ignore the world and the consequences of his disastrous actions. At several times in the novel, Cervantes validates this suspicion that Don Quixote may know more than he admits. Therefore, when Don Quixote suddenly declares himself sane at the end of the novel, we wonder at his ability to shake off his madness so quickly and ask whether he has at least partly feigned this madness. On the other hand, we can read Don Quixote’s character as a warning that even the most intelligent and otherwise practically minded person can fall victim to his own foolishness. Furthermore, we may see Don Quixote’s adventures as a warning that chivalry—or any other outmoded set of values—can both produce positive and negative outcomes. Given the social turmoil of the period in which Cervantes wrote, this latter reading is particularly appealing. Nonetheless, all of these readings of Don Quixote’s character operate in the novel.
The simple peasant who follows Don Quixote out of greed, curiosity, and loyalty, Sancho is the novel’s only character to exist both inside and outside of Don Quixote’s mad world. Other characters play along with and exploit Don Quixote’s madness, but Sancho often lives in and adores it, sometimes getting caught up in the madness entirely. On the other hand, he often berates Don Quixote for his reliance on fantasy; in this sense, he is Don Quixote’s foil. Whereas Don Quixote is too serious for his own good, Sancho has a quick sense of humor. Whereas Don Quixote pays lip service to a woman he has never even seen, Sancho truly loves his wife, Teresa. While Don Quixote deceives himself and others, Sancho lies only when it suits him.
Living in both Don Quixote’s world and the world of his contemporaries, Sancho is able to create his own niche between them. He embodies the good and the bad aspects of both the current era and the bygone days of chivalry. He displays the faults that most of the sane characters in the novel exhibit but has an underlying honorable and compassionate streak that the others largely lack. Sancho does not share Don Quixote’s maddening belief in chivalrous virtues, but he avoids swerving toward the other extreme that equates power with honor. Though Sancho begins the novel looking more like the contemporaries against whom Don Quixote rebels, he eventually relinquishes his fascination with these conventions and comes to live honorably and happily in his simple position in life. He therefore comes across as the character with the most varied perspective and the most wisdom, learning from the world around him thanks to his constant curiosity. Though Sancho is an appealing character on many levels, it is this curiosity that is responsible for much of our connection with him. He observes and thinks about Don Quixote, enabling us to judge Don Quixote. Sancho humanizes the story, bringing dignity and poise, but also humor and compassion.
Through Sancho, Cervantes critiques the ill-conceived equation of class and worth. Though Sancho is ignorant, illiterate, cowardly, and foolish, he nonetheless proves himself a wise and just ruler, a better governor than the educated, wealthy, and aristocratic Duke. By the time Sancho returns home for the last time, he has gained confidence in himself and in his ability to solve problems, regardless of his lower-class status. Sancho frequently reminds his listeners that God knows what he means. With this saying, he shows that faith in God may be a humanizing force that distinguishes truly honorable men, even when they have lower-class origins.
Don Quixote’s exploits, Dulcinea, we are told, is a simple peasant woman who has no knowledge of the valorous deeds that Don Quixote commits in her name. We never meet Dulcinea in the novel, and on the two occasions when it seems she might appear, some trickery keeps her away from the action. In the first case, the priest intercepts Sancho, who is on his way to deliver a letter to Dulcinea from Don Quixote. In the second instance, Sancho says that Dulcinea has been enchanted and that he thus cannot locate her.
Despite her absence from the novel, Dulcinea is an important force because she epitomizes Don Quixote’s chivalric conception of the perfect woman. In his mind, she is beautiful and virtuous, and she makes up for her lack of background and lineage with her good deeds. Don Quixote describes her chiefly in poetic terms that do little to specify her qualities. She is, therefore, important not for who she is but for what her character represents and for what she indicates about Don Quixote’s character.
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Themes
Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work.
Perspective and Narration
Don Quixote, which is composed of three different sections, is a rich exploration of the possibilities of narration. The first of these sections, comprising the chapter covering Don Quixote’s first expedition, functions chiefly as a parody of contemporary romance tales. The second section, comprising the rest of the First Part, is written under the guise of a history, plodding along in historical fashion and breaking up chapters episodically, carefully documenting every day’s events. The third section, which covers the Second Part of the novel, is different since it is written as a more traditional novel, organized by emotional and thematic content and filled with character development. Cervantes alone reports the story in the first section, using a straightforward narrative style. In the second section, Cervantes informs us that he is translating the manuscript of Cide Hamete Benengeli and often interrupts the narration to mention Benengeli and the internal inconsistencies in Benengeli’s manuscript. Here, Cervantes uses Benengeli primarily to reinforce his claim that the story is a true history.In the third section, however, Cervantes enters the novel as a character—as a composite of Benengeli and Cervantes the author. The characters themselves, aware of the books that have been written about them, try to alter the content of subsequent editions. This complicated and self-referential narrative structure leaves us somewhat disoriented, unable to tell which plotlines are internal to the story and which are factual. This disorientation engrosses us directly in the story and emphasizes the question of sanity that arises throughout the novel. If someone as mad as Don Quixote can write his own story, we wonder what would prevent us from doing the same. Cervantes gives us many reasons to doubt him in the second section. In the third section, however, when we are aware of another allegedly false version of the novel and a second Don Quixote, we lose all our footing and have no choice but to abandon ourselves to the story and trust Cervantes. However, having already given us reasons to distrust him, Cervantes forces us to question fundamental principles of narration, just as Quixote forces his contemporaries to question their lifestyles and principles. In this way, the form of the novel mirrors its function, creating a universe in which Cervantes entertains and instructs us, manipulating our preconceptions to force us to examine them more closely.
Incompatible Systems of Morality
Don Quixote tries to be a flesh-and-blood example of a knight-errant in an attempt to force his contemporaries to face their own failure to maintain the old system of morality, the chivalric code. This conflict between the old and the new reaches an absolute impasse: no one understands Don Quixote, and he understands no one. Only the simple-minded Sancho, with both self-motivated desires and a basic understanding of morality, can mediate between Don Quixote and the rest of the world. Sancho often subscribes to the morals of his day but then surprises us by demonstrating a belief in the anachronistic morals of chivalry as well.In the First Part of the novel, we see the impasse between Don Quixote and those around him. Don Quixote cannot, for instance, identify with the priest’s rational perspective and objectives, and Don Quixote’s belief in enchantment appears ridiculous to the priest. Toward the end of the Second Part, however, Cervantes compromises between these two seemingly incompatible systems of morality, allowing Don Quixote’s imaginary world and the commonplace world of the Duke and the Duchess to infiltrate each other. As the two worlds begin to mix, we start to see the advantages and disadvantages of each. Sancho ultimately prevails, subscribing to his timeless aphorisms and ascetic discipline on the one hand and using his rational abilities to adapt to the present on the other.
The Distinction between Class and Worth
Distinguishing between a person’s class and a person’s worth was a fairly radical idea in Cervantes’s time. In Don Quixote, Cervantes attacks the conventional notion that aristocrats are automatically respectable and noble. The contrast between the Duke and Duchess’s thoughtless malice and Sancho’s anxiety-ridden compassion highlights this problem of class. Despite his low social status, the peasant Sancho is wise and thoughtful. Likewise, the lowly goatherds and shepherds often appear as philosophers. In contrast, the cosmopolitan or aristocratic characters like the Duke and Duchess are often frivolous and unkind. Cervantes’s emphasis on these disparities between class and worth is a primary reason that Don Quixote was such a revolutionary work in its time.Motifs
Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, and literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes.
Honor
Some characters in Don Quixote show a deep concern for their personal honor and some do not. Cervantes implies that either option can lead to good or disastrous results. Anselmo, for example, is so overly protective of his wife’s honor that he distrusts her fidelity, which ultimately results in her adultery and his death. Likewise, Don Quixote’s obsession with his honor leads him to do battle with parties who never mean him offense or harm. On the other hand, Dorothea’s concern for her personal honor leads her to pursue Ferdinand, with happy results for both of them. In these examples, we see that characters who are primarily concerned with socially prescribed codes of honor, such as Anselmo and Don Quixote, meet with difficulty, while those who set out merely to protect their own personal honor, such as Dorothea, meet with success.Other characters, especially those who exploit Don Quixote’s madness for their own entertainment, seem to care very little about their personal honor. The Duke and Duchess show that one’s true personal honor has nothing to do with the honor typically associated with one’s social position. Fascination with such public conceptions of honor can be taken to an extreme, dominating one’s life and leading to ruin. Sancho initially exhibits such a fascination, confusing honor with social status, but he eventually comes to the realization that excessive ambition only creates trouble. In this sense, Cervantes implies that personal honor can be a powerful and positive motivating force while socially prescribed notions of honor, which are often hollow and false, can be destructive if adhered to obsessively.
Romance
Though many people in Don Quixote’s world seem to have given up on romantic love, Don Quixote and a few other characters hold dear this ideal. Don Louis’s love for Clara, Camacho’s wedding, and the tale of the captive and Zoraida, for instance, are all situations in which romantic love rises above all else. Even in the case of Sancho and Teresa, romantic love prevails as a significant part of matrimonial commitment, which we see in Teresa’s desire to honor her husband at court. Ironically, Don Quixote’s own devotion to Dulcinea mocks romantic love, pushing it to the extreme as he idolizes a woman he has never even seen.Literature
Don Quixote contains several discussions about the relative merits of different types of literature, including fiction and historical literature. Most of the characters, including the priest and the canon of Toledo, ultimately maintain that literature should tell the truth. Several even propose that the government should practice censorship to prevent the evil falsehoods of certain books from corrupting innocent minds like Don Quixote’s. However, we see that even the true histories in the novel end up disclosing falsehoods. Cervantes declares that Don Quixote itself is not fiction but a translation of a historical account. The fact that we know that this claim of Cervantes’s is false—since the work is fictional—makes Cervantes’s symbolism clear: no matter how truthful a writer’s intentions may be, he or she can never tell the whole truth. Despite these inherent flaws, however, literature remains a powerful force in the novel, guiding the lives of many characters, especially Don Quixote. Notions of authorship and storytelling preoccupy the characters throughout the novel, since many of them consider the idea of writing their own histories as their own narrators.Symbols
Symbols are objects, characters, figures, and colors used to represent abstract ideas or concepts.
Books and Manuscripts
The books and manuscripts that appear everywhere in Don Quixote symbolize the importance and influence of fiction and literature in everyday life. The books instruct and inform the ignorant and provide an imaginative outlet for characters with otherwise dull lives.Horses
Horses symbolize movement and status in the novel and often denote a character’s worth or class. The pilgrims outside Barcelona, for instance, walk to the city. The noblemen ride in carriages, and the robbers and Don Quixote ride on horseback. In Don Quixote’s mind, at least, the appearance of horses on the horizon symbolizes the coming of a new adventure. Indeed, Rocinante and Dapple play an important role in the journeys of Don Quixote and Sancho; they are not only means of transport and symbols of status but also companions.Inns
The inns that appear throughout the novel are meeting places for people of all classes. They are the only locations in the novel where ordinarily segregated individuals speak and exchange stories. Inns symbolize rest and food but also corruption and greed, since many innkeepers in the novel are devious. Sancho often longs to stay at an inn rather than follow Don Quixote’s chivalric desire to sleep under the stars. These opposing preferences show Sancho’s connection with reality and society and his instinctive desire for comfort, in contrast to Don Quixote’s alienation from society and its norms. Even when he does stay at inns, Don Quixote is noticeably alienated from the major events that take place there, such as the reunification of the four lovers in the First Part.IMPORTANT QUOTATIONS (DQ)
1. [F]or what I want of Dulcinea del Toboso she is as good as the greatest princess in the land. For not all those poets who praise ladies under names which they choose so freely, really have such mistresses. . . .I am quite satisfied. . . to imagine and believe that the good Aldonza Lorenzo is so lovely and virtuous. . . .
Explain: In this quotation from Chapter XXV of the First Part, Don Quixote explains to Sancho that the actual behavior of the farmer’s daughter, Aldonza Lorenzo, does not matter as long as he can imagine her perfectly as his princess, Dulcinea del Toboso. This idea of Dulcinea figures prominently in the novel, since we never actually meet Dulcinea, and she likely does not even know about Don Quixote’s patronage. Don Quixote’s imagination compensates for many holes in the novel’s narration, providing explanations for inexplicable phenomena and turning apparently mundane events into great adventures. Dulcinea gains renown through Don Quixote’s praise, and regardless of whether she is even real, she exists in fame and in the imaginations of all the characters who read about her. In this way, Don Quixote’s imaginings take on the force of reality and he becomes, effectively, the narrator of his own fate.
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2. I shall never be fool enough to turn knight-errant. For I see quite well that it’s not the fashion now to do as they did in the olden days when they say those famous knights roamed the world.
Second, this quotation highlights the priest’s hypocritical nature. The innkeeper appreciates knight-errantry from a distance, but the priest, who plays the role of inquisitor against Don Quixote throughout much of the novel, cannot escape his fascination with knight-errantry. The priest furtively encourages Don Quixote’s madness so that he may live vicariously through him.
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3. Now that I’ve to be sitting on a bare board, does your worship want me to flay my bum?
Explain: Sancho puts this question to Don Quixote in Chapter XLI of the Second Part, after Don Quixote suggests that Sancho whip himself to free Dulcinea from her alleged enchantment. With these words, which display his sarcastic wit, skepticism, and insubordinate nature, Sancho refuses to obey Don Quixote’s order. The tale of Dulcinea’s enchantment literally comes back to bite Sancho in the rear end—Sancho originally tells Don Quixote that Dulcinea is enchanted in an effort to hide the fact that he does not know where she lives and what she looks like. Sancho’s lie nearly catches up with him a number of times until the Duchess finally snares him completely, telling him that Dulcinea actually has been enchanted. Sancho gullibly believes her story and later agrees to whip himself 3,300 times in order to revoke Dulcinea’s enchantment. Nonetheless, Sancho is not happy with this course of action, and in the end he stands up to Don Quixote about it. This quotation not only fleshes out Sancho’s character but also exemplifies the bawdy humor that pervades Don Quixote. Deeply ironic and complex, the novel is also very funny.
4.Great hearts, my dear master, should be patient in misfortune as well as joyful in prosperity. And this I judge from myself. For if I was merry when I was Governor now that I’m a squire on foot I’m not sad, for I’ve heard tell that Fortune, as they call her, is a drunken and capricious woman and, worse still, blind; and so she doesn’t see what she’s doing, and doesn’t know whom she is casting down or raising up.
Explain: Sancho’s final words of wisdom to Don Quixote, which appear in Chapter LXVI of the Second Part, caution Don Quixote to be patient even in his retirement. Sancho’s statement marks the complete reversal of his and Don Quixote’s roles as servant and master. Throughout the novel, Don Quixote determines Sancho’s role as a squire while teaching Sancho the chivalric philosophy that drives him. Now, however, Sancho consoles Don Quixote with the simple wisdom he has gained from his own experiences. Interestingly, Sancho still calls Don Quixote “dear master,” even though he is no longer truly in Don Quixote’s service. Resigned to his humble station in life, he is not only simple and loyal but also wise and gentle.
5. For me alone Don Quixote was born and I for him. His was the power of action, mine of writing.
Explain: These parting words of Cide Hamete Benengeli, in Chapter LXXIV of the Second Part, reflect Cervantes’s words at the novel’s beginning. At the start, Cervantes declares that Don Quixote is only his stepson—in other words, that he is not fully responsible for creating the character of Don Quixote. Don Quixote’s real father, according to Cervantes’s account, is Benengeli, the Moor from whose manuscript Cervantes claims to translate Don Quixote. Such remarks give the text a mythical, unreal tone that leaves us unsure whom to trust or to whom to attribute the story of Don Quixote. Additionally, the powerful sentiment that Benengeli expresses here contributes to the novel’s claim that Don Quixote was a real person. Benengeli de-emphasizes his role in bringing Don Quixote’s story to light by casting himself as a mere recorder of a great man’s life and deeds.
