Don Quixote-A Summary

Don 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 erdinand 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.