Don Quixote – Losing Sanity While Searching for Meaning
Readers of Cervantes’ Don Quixote come away wanting one question answered: Is Don Quixote sane? The following is a detailed account of Quixote’s visit with a psychiatrist upon his return to his village. This incident was apparently not recorded in the original novel for fear that Quixote’s reputation might be tarnished. Documentation of his visit was recently recovered by researchers who discovered the incident in a psychiatrist’s manuscript. The practitioner was evidently very interested in the meeting as he transcribed the conversation word for word. The recovery of this important information reveals some shocking revelations about Quixote’s state of mind. The psychiatrist’s analysis of Don Quixote’s personality allows the reader to understand the rationale behind his behaviors. Quixote’s hallucinations, megalomania, paranoia and evident mid-life crisis are analyzed to determine his sanity.
Psychiatrist: Welcome, Mr. Quixote. Please be seated.
Quixote: My title is Don Quixote de la Mancha, but you may call me Don Quixote.
Psychiatrist: Very well, Mr. Quixote. Now tell me, what is it that brings you here?
Quixote: It all started about a couple of months ago when I began having these hallucinations.
Psychiatrist: Yes, I do recall that I read a certain exploit of yours in which you attacked a windmill. Is that correct?
Quixote: Aye, sir, windmills. But they were giants! They were giants as plain as day!
Psychiatrist: I see.... Well perhaps this was just a quirk of nature.
Quixote: Well, actually, sir, every time I see an inn, I mistake it for a castle.
Psychiatrist: Hmmmm. This is indeed bizarre. Have you been getting sufficient sleep?...
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...knight errantry, Quixote was searching for meaning. His quest for a purpose in life follows a universal tendency. Viktor Frankl dramatizes a modern view of the quest in his book Man's Search for Meaning. He recounts his struggle to survive and find personal meaning while enveloped in the horrifying depths of a Nazi concentration camp. Frankl was forced to look within to discover meaning in his existence. Quixote mistakenly searched for meaning in life through outside means. Though reasonably sane, Don Quixote lost touch with reality in his search for meaning as he became enveloped in the fanciful world of knight errantry.
Reference
Cervantes, Miguel de. Don Quixote. Trans. J. M. Cohen. London: Penguin, 1986.
Frankl, Viktor. Man's Search for Meaning. Trans. Ilse Lasch. Boston: Beacon, 1963.
Roediger, Henry L. Psychology. New York: HarperCollins, 1991.
The sickness of insanity stems from external forces and stimuli, ever-present in our world, weighing heavily on the psychological, neurological, and cognitive parts of our mind. It can drive one to madness through its relentless, biased, and poisoned view of the world, creating a dichotomy between what is real and imagined. It is a defense mechanism that allows one to suffer the harms of injustice, prejudice, and discrimination, all at the expense of one’s physical and mental faculties.
...found that the book gave perspective to each of the individual classes, rather than covering only the bourgeois or the proletariat. Today you will scarcely find a job or institution were women are not allowed, had I not read this chapter it would have been very difficult for me to understand what women at this time went through.
De Cervantes, Miguel. Don Quixote De La Mancha. Trans. Charles Jarvis. Ed. E. C. Riley. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999. Print.
Newton’s birth in 1646 came at the tail-end of the 30-years war which was fought in Central Europe. The war began in 1618 in Bohemia over religious differences between Protestants and Catholics; however as time passed, the war became more political and soon most countries in Europe were involved (Ellis & Esler, 1999). The war ended in 1648 by a series of treaties knows as the Pease of Westphalia with France coming out victorious gaining land from both Spain and Germany (Ellis & Esler, 1999). The tension felt between the Protestants and Catholics was mirrored in England where there was a civil war beginning in 1640 and continuing until 1659. Early in the civil war Oliver Cromwell was chosen as leader of Parliament with his staunch Puritan beliefs; he soon became a leader of the Protestant side of the war. During this time, many considered England to be almost in anarchy with groups such as the Ranters, Levellers, and Diggers battling over various religious and political beliefs (Merriman, 1996). In 1649 Charles I, who had been King of England prior to the civil war, was beheaded and England became a Commonwealth and ...
Faulkner bought a pre-Civil War mansion called “Rowanoak” in Oxford, Mississippi which would be his home until the very day he dies.
Leo Buscaglia, a motivational speaker and American author, once stated, “Life is uncharted territory. It reveals its story one moment at a time” (thinkexist.com). The quotation reveals that anyone can have an adventure because life is an adventure. Homer’s the Odyssey and Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote tell the stories of Odysseus and Don Quixote. The two men’s lives are full of adventure, but they are two completely different adventures. Odysseus continually fights for his life, whereas Don Quixote simply fights for chivalry. Odysseus and Don Quixote are different adventure heroes because of the reasons for their adventures, their accomplishments, and their bravery.
On September 25, 1897 in New Albany, Mississippi, a son was born to Murry Cuthbert and Maud Butler Faulkner. This baby, born into a proud, genteel Southern family, would become a mischievous boy, an indifferent student, and drop out of school; yet “his mother’s faith in him was absolutely unshakable. When so many others easily and confidently pronounced her son a failure, she insisted that he was a genius and that the world would come to recognize that fact” (Zane). And she was right. Her son would become one of the most exalted American writers of the 20th century, winning the Nobel Prize for Literature and two Pulitzers during his lifetime. Her son was William Faulkner.
William Faulkner was a twentieth century American author who won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Most famous for his novel The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner defines Southern literature. In his mythical county of Yaknapatawpha, Faulkner contrasted the past with the present era. The past was represented in Emily Grierson, Colonel Sartoris, the Board of Alderman, and the Negro servant. Homer Barron, the new Board of Alderman, and the new sheriff represented the present.
William Faulkner was a prolific writer who became very famous during his lifetime but who shied away from the spotlight as much as possible. He is remembered as both a gentlemanly southern eccentric and an arrogant, snobbish alcoholic. But perhaps the best way to describe Faulkner is to describe his heritage, for, like so many of his literary characters, Faulkner was profoundly affected by his family.
Don Quixote is a parody of comedic relief and historical reference written by Miguel de Cervantes. The storyline follows the misadventures of a manic Don Quixote in his distorted view of reality. Cervantes uses the trajectory of Don Quixote’s madness to reveal that there is lunacy in everyone.
Conclusively, throughout Don Quixote, Miguel Cervantes explores the transformation of reality. By doing this, he critiques and reflects conventional societal literary norms. In three distinct scenes, Don Quixote or his partner, Sancho, transform reality. Often they are met with other’s discontent. It is through the innkeeper scene, the windmill scene, the Benedictine friar scene, and Quixote’s deathbed scene that Cervantes contemplates revolutionary philosophies and literary techniques. The theme of reality transformation does not even stop there. Sometimes the transformations of reality scenes act as a mimetic devices. Ultimately, Miguel Cervantes use of transformative scenes acts as a creative backdrop for deeper observations and critiques on seventeenth-century Spanish society.
Spanish life, thought, and feeling at the end of chivalry. Don Quixote has been called
Don Quixote is one of the oldest forms of the modern novel. Written in the early 17th century it follows the adventures of Don Quixote and his sidekick Sancho Panza. In Don Quixote, Cervantes satirizes the idea of a hero. Don Quixote sees himself as a noble knight among the ignorant common folk, but everyone else sees him as a bumbling idiot who has gone mad. Therefore, the novel’s longevity in the western canon is due to the humorous power struggle and the quest of a hero Don Quixote faces throughout the story.
In his novel, Don Quixote, Miguel Cervantes proves that a strong imagination is necessary to lead a fulfilling life. The main character, Alonso Quejana, is a man close to the age of fifty who has spent most of his life reading books about the medieval knights. In doing so, he has altered his sense of reality and came to believing he himself was a knight errant. He gave himself the name Don Quixote and decided to follow the chivalric code and bring justice to the world. Before Quejana became Quixote, he had no desire to help out humanity or bring an end to injustice, but with the help of his imagination his whole outlook on life changed. He saw life how it should be through his ideals rather than the reality of it.
Miguel de Cervantes' greatest literary work, Don Quixote, maintains an enduring, if somewhat stereotypical image in the popular culture: the tale of the obsessed knight and his clownish squire who embark on a faith-driven, adventure-seeking quest. However, although this simple premise has survived since the novel's inception, and spawned such universally known concepts or images as quixotic idealism and charging headlong at a group of "giants" which are actually windmills, Cervantes' motivation for writing Don Quixote remains an untold story. Looking at late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Spain from the viewpoint of a Renaissance man, Cervantes came to dislike many aspects of the age in which he lived, and decided to satirize what he saw as its failings; however, throughout the writing of what would become his most famous work, Cervantes was torn by a philosophical conflict which pervaded the Renaissance and its intellectuals--the clash of faith and reason.