Republic of the Philippines

State Universities and Colleges

GUIMARAS STATE COLLEGE

DIOREMARK E. GALIMBA ANICIA ASUNCION H. JACILDO Professor

Discussant

Don Quixote
Miguel de Cervantes y Saavedra

About The Author

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra was a Spanish novelist, poet, and playwright. His
novel Don Quixote is often considered his magnum opus, as well as the first modern novel. It is
assumed that Miguel de Cervantes was born in Alcalá de Henares. His father was Rodrigo de
Cervantes, a surgeon of cordoban descent. Little is known of his mother Leonor de Cortinas,
except that she was a native of Arganda del Rey.
In 1569, Cervantes moved to Italy, where he served as a valet to Giulio Acquaviva, a
wealthy priest who was elevated to cardinal the next year. By then, Cervantes had enlisted as a
soldier in a Spanish Navy infantry regiment and continued his military life until 1575, when he
was captured by Algerian corsairs. He was then released on ransom from his captors by his
parents and the Trinitarians, a Catholic religious order. He subsequently returned to his family in
Madrid.
In Esquivias (Province of Toledo), on 12 December 1584, he married the much younger
Catalina de Salazar y Palacios (Toledo, Esquivias –, 31 October 1626), daughter of Fernando
de Salazar y Vozmediano and Catalina de Palacios. Her uncle Alonso de Quesada y Salazar is
said to have inspired the character of Don Quixote. During the next 20 years Cervantes led a
nomadic existence, working as a purchasing agent for the Spanish Armada and as a tax
collector. He suffered a bankruptcy and was imprisoned at least twice (1597 and 1602) for
irregularities in his accounts. Between 1596 and 1600, he lived primarily in Seville. In 1606,
Cervantes settled in Madrid, where he remained for the rest of his life.
Cervantes died in Madrid on April 23, 1616.

Summary

Part 1: El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha (“The Ingenious Hidalgo Don
Quixote of La Mancha”)

Don Quixote (right) and his squire, Sancho Panza;

illustration from a 19th-century edition
of Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes.

The work opens in a village of La Mancha, Spain, where a country gentleman’s

infatuation with books of chivalry leads him to decide to become a knight-errant, and he
assumes the name Don Quixote. He finds an antique suit of armour and attaches a visor made
of pasteboard to an old helmet. He then declares that his old nag is the noble steed Rocinante.
According to Don Quixote, a knight-errant also needs a lady to love, and he selects a peasant
girl from a nearby town, christening her Dulcinea del Toboso. Thus accoutred, he heads out to
perform deeds of heroism in her name. He arrives at an inn, which he believes is a castle, and
insists that the innkeeper knight him. After being told that he must carry money and extra
clothes, Don Quixote decides to go home. On his way, he picks a fight with a group of
merchants, and they beat him. When he recovers, he persuades the peasant Sancho Panza to
act as his squire with the promise that Sancho will one day get an island to rule.
Don Quixote subsequently encounters Cardenio, who lives like a wild man in the woods
because he believes that Luscinda, the woman he loves, betrayed him. Don Quixote decides to
emulate him to prove his great love for Dulcinea, and he sends Sancho to deliver a letter to her.
When Sancho stops at an inn, he finds two of Don Quixote’s old friends, a priest and a barber,
looking for him. They decide that one of them should pose as a damsel in distress to try to lure
Don Quixote home. En route, they come across a young woman, Dorotea, who was betrayed by
Don Fernando, who married Luscinda. Dorotea agrees to pretend to be a princess whose
kingdom has been seized by a giant, and Don Quixote is persuaded to help her. They stop at
the inn, where Don Fernando and Luscinda soon arrive. Luscinda is reunited with Cardenio, and
Don Fernando promises to marry Dorotea. Later, the priest and the barber put Don Quixote in a
wooden cage and persuade him that he is under an enchantment that will take him to Dulcinea.
Eventually, they return him home.

Part 2: Segunda parte del ingenioso caballero don Quijote de la Mancha (“Second Part of
the Ingenious Knight Don Quixote of La Mancha”)
Part 2 begins a month after the end of part 1, but many of the characters have already
read that book and so know about Don Quixote. He becomes convinced that Dulcinea is under
an enchantment that has turned her into an ordinary peasant girl. Don Quixote and Sancho
meet a duke and duchess who are prone to pranks. In one such ruse, they persuade the two
men that Sancho must give himself 3,300 lashes to break the curse on Dulcinea. The duke later
makes Sancho the governor of a town that he tells Sancho is the isle of Barataria. There
Sancho is presented with various disputes, and he shows wisdom in his decisions. However,
after a week in office and being subjected to other pranks, he decides to give up the
governorship. In the meantime, the duke and duchess play other tricks on Don Quixote.
Eventually, Don Quixote and Sancho leave. After learning that a false sequel to the book
about him says that he traveled to Zaragoza, Don Quixote decides to avoid that city and go
instead to Barcelona. Following various adventures there, Don Quixote is challenged by the
Knight of the White Moon (a student from La Mancha in disguise), and he is defeated.
According to the terms of the battle, Don Quixote is required to return home. Along the way,
Sancho pretends to administer the required lashings to himself, and they meet a character from
the false sequel. After they arrive home, Don Quixote falls ill, renounces chivalry as foolish
fiction and dies.

Themes

While it is necessary to acknowledge the satiric intent of Cervantes’ novel, the rich
fictional world of Don Quixote de la Mancha utterly transcends its local occasion. On the most
personal level, the novel can be viewed as one of the most intimate evaluations of a life ever
penned by a great author. When Don Quixote decides to take up the cause of knight-errantry,
he opens himself to a life of ridicule and defeat, a life that resembles Cervantes’ own life, with its
endless reversals of fortune, humiliations, and hopeless struggles. Out of this life of failure and
disappointment Cervantes created the “mad knight,” but he also added the curious human
nobility and the refusal to succumb to despair in the face of defeat that turns Quixote into
something more than a comic character or a ridiculous figure to be mocked. Although there are
almost no points in the novel where actual incidents from Cervantes’ life appear directly or even
transformed into fictional disguise, the tone and the spirit, the succession of catastrophes with
only occasional moments of slight glory, and the resilience of human nature mark the novel as
the most personal work of the author, the one where his singularly difficult life and his
profoundly complex emotional responses to that life found form and structure.
If the novel is the record of Cervantes’ life, the fiction also records a moment in Spanish
national history when fortunes were shifting and tides turning. At the time of Cervantes’ birth,
Spain’s might and glory were at their peak. The wealth from conquests of Mexico and Peru
returned to Spain, commerce boomed, and artists recorded the sense of national pride with
magnificent energy and power. By the time Don Quixote de la Mancha was published, the
Spanish Empire was beginning its decline. A series of military disasters, including the defeat of
the Spanish Armada by the English and the revolt of Flanders, had shaken the once mighty
nation. In the figure of Don Quixote, the greatest of a richly remembered past combines with the
hard facts of age, weakness, and declining power. The character embodies a moment of
Spanish history and the Spanish people’s own sense of vanishing glory in the face of
irreversible decline.
Don Quixote de la Mancha also stands as the greatest literary embodiment of the
Counter-Reformation. Throughout Europe, the Reformation was moving with the speed of new
ideas, changing the religious landscape of country after country. Spain stood proud as a
Catholic nation, resisting any changes. Standing alone against the flood of reform sweeping
Europe displayed a kind of willed madness, but the nobility and determination of Quixote to fight
for his beliefs, no matter what the rest of the world maintained, reflects the strength of the
Spanish will at this time. Cervantes was a devout and loyal believer, a supporter of the Church,
and Don Quixote may be the greatest fictional Catholic hero, the battered knight of the Counter-
Reformation.
The book also represents fictionally the various sides of the Spanish spirit and the
Spanish temper. In the divisions and contradictions found between the Knight of the Sad
Countenance and his unlikely squire, Sancho Panza, Cervantes paints the two faces of the
Spanish soul: The Don is idealistic, sprightly, energetic, and cheerful, even in the face of
overwhelming odds, but he is also overbearing, domineering Sancho, who is earthy, servile, and
slothful. The two characters seem unlikely companions and yet they form a whole, the one
somehow incomplete without the other and linked throughout the book through their dialogues
and debates. In drawing master and servant, Cervantes presents the opposing truths of the
spirit of his native land.

Text-to-text Connections

Sometimes two characters have striking similarities. Their stories take place in different
time periods, and they have dramatically different experiences and backgrounds, but they still
relate to each other. One example of this is Jay Gatsby in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby
and Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra’s Don Quixote. The Great Gatsby is set in the United States
during the 1920s, while Don Quixote was written in 1605 in Spain. The two main characters of
these stories, Jay Gatsby and Don Quixote, have very similar and different attributes and
characteristics. Both men create different persona and names to live out their dreams and people
try to stop them from achieving their dream, but the men have different levels of success.
Both men aspired to be different people; Gatsby wanted to be successful financially and
socially and Don Quixote wanted to be a knight. They both had people try to stop them from
achieving their dreams. On the contrary, the men had different levels of success. Gatsby was
successful in being wealthy but failed in being with Daisy. Don Quixote never achieved any of his
dreams. Both men created different personas to live their lives as well. They did not live in reality
and tried to live their lives pretending to be people that they were not.
Resource(s)

 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (J. Rutherford, Trans.). (2003, February
25). Retrieved from https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3836.Don_Quixote
 Augustyn, A. (Ed.). (n.d.). Don Quixote. Retrieved from
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Don-Quixote-novel
 Mambrol, N. (2019, March 31). Analysis of Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote. Literary
Theory and Criticism. Retrieved from https://literariness.org/2019/03/31/analysis-of-
miguel-de-cervantes-don-quixote/