Crazy Old Don Quixote: Pity, The Fool

3 Pages 797 Words

Crazy Old Don Quixote: Pity, the Fool

Don Quixote de la Mancha, written by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra of Alcalá de Henares, Spain, is a novel of “illusion and reality” (Campbell 221). The first book, part one, was published in sixteen hundred and five, and part two was published in sixteen hundred and fifteen. The story takes place in various villages of Spain in the early sixteen hundreds and spans about twenty years. Don Quixote de la Mancha, the main character is an avid reader of chivalric novels. He flees from his home and makes an attempt at a chivalric lifestyle. Upon his return home, his family believed he was insane, so they walled-in the door to the library and burned most of his books. On his second flight of chivalric behavior, he takes along a servant by promising him leadership of his own island. Quixote falls deeper and deeper into this fantastic world he has constructed in his own mind. For twenty years he travels the land of Spain in an effort to re-establish the chivalric way of life that the Spanish have left behind.
“Chivalric novels were the most popular form of literature in Cervantes’s time (Campbell 222). These books consisted of stunning knights on horseback and their battles with dragons and wizards. The books told of how the daring knights charged into battle to save the damsel in distress. Cervantes’s novel is a satire to the people of Spain. He was attacking these chivalric novels with his own version of a chivalric novel. “His stated goal in writing Don Quixote was to destroy the influence of these novels” (Campbell 222). Cervantes felt that the people of Spain actually believed that they too could partake in lives of chivalry like the characters in the books they had spent countless hours indulging in. Cervantes thought that taking chivalric novels literally as Quixote did, was dangerous. In Quixote’s case, “the language of chivalric novels is immediately translat...