Don Quixote

A parody that became the first modern novel

Don Quixote is a novel by Miguel de Cervantes, published in two parts in Spain: Part One in 1605 and Part Two in 1615, a year before the author's death. Its full Spanish title calls its hero the ingenious gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha. Cervantes set out to mock the books of chivalry, long romances about knights, giants and enchanters that were popular in his day. He ended up writing a book that many critics call the first modern novel.

Cervantes had a hard life. He lost the use of his left hand at the naval battle of Lepanto in 1571, spent five years as a captive in Algiers, and later worked as a tax collector and went to prison over his accounts. That experience of war, captivity and poverty runs under the comedy.

The book plays games with its own authorship. The narrator claims that most of the story comes from an Arabic manuscript by a historian named Cide Hamete Benengeli, translated for him by a Moorish boy in Toledo. This frame lets Cervantes joke about truth, lies and who controls a story.

Common English translations include those by Edith Grossman (2003), John Rutherford and Tobias Smollett. The book is long, close to 1,000 pages in most editions, and made up of short chapters, many of which work as separate episodes.

Part One: the first sally

In a village in La Mancha lives a gentleman of about fifty, named Alonso Quixano or something close to it. He owns a lance, an old shield, a thin horse and a greyhound. He reads books of chivalry day and night until his brain dries up and he believes every word.

He decides to become a knight errant. He cleans his great-grandfather's armor, makes a visor out of cardboard, and names his horse Rocinante. He takes the name Don Quixote de la Mancha. A knight needs a lady, so he chooses a farm girl he once admired from a distance, Aldonza Lorenzo, and renames her Dulcinea del Toboso. She never knows.

He rides out alone. He takes a roadside inn for a castle and the innkeeper for its lord, and insists on being dubbed a knight. The innkeeper plays along. On the road, Don Quixote stops a farmer beating his servant boy, Andrés, and makes him promise to pay the boy. As soon as the knight leaves, the farmer beats the boy harder. Later, Don Quixote challenges a group of merchants to swear that Dulcinea is the most beautiful woman alive. A muleteer beats him with his own lance. A neighbor carries him home on a donkey.

His friends, the priest and the barber, decide the books are to blame. With his niece and housekeeper, they burn most of his library and wall up the room. They tell him an enchanter carried it away.

Part One: Sancho Panza and the windmills

Don Quixote recruits a poor, simple farmer, Sancho Panza, as his squire. He promises Sancho the governorship of an island. Sancho leaves his wife and children and follows on his donkey.

In the most famous episode, they see thirty or forty windmills on the plain. Don Quixote sees giants with long arms. Sancho tells him they are windmills. Don Quixote charges, his lance catches a sail, and he is thrown to the ground. He says an enchanter turned the giants into windmills to rob him of glory. The phrase "tilting at windmills" comes from this scene.

The adventures follow a pattern. Don Quixote sees a romance where there is ordinary life. He attacks two flocks of sheep, believing they are armies, and the shepherds knock out some of his teeth with stones. He takes a barber's brass basin for the golden helmet of Mambrino and wears it. He frees a chain of galley slaves being marched to the king's ships because no man should be forced. The prisoners, led by the thief Ginés de Pasamonte, stone him and steal Sancho's coat.

Sancho is the knight's opposite. He is hungry, practical and full of proverbs. He believes some of his master's promises and doubts others. Their long conversations on the road are the heart of the book.

Part One: stories within the story

In the Sierra Morena mountains, Don Quixote decides to do penance for Dulcinea, as the knight Amadís did in the romances. He sends Sancho with a letter to her. Sancho never delivers it.

Here Cervantes weaves in other stories. Cardenio, a young man driven mad by betrayal, lives wild in the mountains. Dorotea, a woman seduced and abandoned by the nobleman Don Fernando, is disguised as a boy. Their plots meet at an inn, where the lovers are reunited. The priest reads aloud a novella, The Man Who Was Recklessly Curious, about a husband who tests his wife's faithfulness and destroys his marriage. A former captive tells of his escape from Algiers, close to Cervantes's own experience.

To get Don Quixote home, the priest and barber disguise themselves and persuade him that he is enchanted. They carry him back to his village in a cage on an ox cart. Part One ends with him in bed, and the narrator hints at a third sally.

Part Two: the knight who knows he is famous

Part Two came out ten years later. In the meantime, another writer, using the name Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda, published a fake sequel in 1614. Cervantes answers it inside his own book: his characters read the fake, mock it, and change their route to prove it false.

In Part Two, many people have read Part One. A student, Sansón Carrasco, tells Don Quixote and Sancho that they are characters in a famous book. Strangers recognize them. This makes them both victims and celebrities.

Sancho, sent to find Dulcinea in El Toboso, cannot. He points to three peasant girls on donkeys and says one is Dulcinea. Don Quixote sees only a coarse farm girl, and concludes that enchanters have turned his lady ugly. For the rest of the book he seeks a way to break the spell.

Carrasco, disguised as the Knight of the Mirrors, challenges Don Quixote, hoping to defeat him and send him home. Don Quixote wins by luck. He faces a caged lion, which turns its back on him. He descends into the Cave of Montesinos and comes back with a dream of enchanted knights, which even he half doubts. He wrecks a puppet show, run by Ginés de Pasamonte in disguise, to save the puppet heroine.

Part Two: the duke and duchess

A rich duke and duchess, who have read Part One, invite the pair to their castle. They stage elaborate jokes: a wooden horse, Clavileño, that Don Quixote and Sancho ride blindfolded while servants blow air at them and pretend they are flying, and a plan to free Dulcinea that requires Sancho to whip himself 3,300 times.

As the biggest joke, they give Sancho the governorship of an "island," a town called Barataria. Sancho surprises them. He judges cases with sense and fairness and makes useful laws. After ten days, the jokers stage a night attack, and Sancho, bruised, gives up the post. He says he would rather be free than govern.