Don Quijote Research Paper

Imagination vs Reality in Don Quijote

Don Quijote, published in the sixteenth century by arguably the greatest Spanish writer of all time, Miguel Cervantes, is a classic enduring tale of a man searching for a greater purpose in life, a man who wants to be remembered. This legendary tale has endured the test of time in part because of the fact that so many people can relate to the titular character. Roberto Echevarría, a literary scholar who has spent many years studying Cervantes’ works states, “Literature, fiction, allows us to rehearse in private our most secret desires, affecting our lives as if these desires had become true. It is like dreams. Dreams have the same effect. This is the allure of literature and also its danger. We can live lives other than ours full of adventures, untrammelled by society’s constraints and by our own limitations. Does doing this purge us of those desires? Or does it induce more desires and inflame the desire to close the gap between desire and reality?”1 We may not all be on a quest to become a hero or a knight or another romantic occupation, but we all have a deep yearning to be something more, something greater.

His habit of transforming everyday people and objects into more dramatic, epic, and fantastical versions of themselves forces the people around him to make a choice. Adapt to his way of seeing the world, or try to convince him to see reality. Throughout the novel, we find out that the general consensus is to just go along with Quijote’s fanatical imagination. However, as always, there are some, such as the barber and the priest who initially try to bring the knight back into a more traditional view of the world and away from