Themes In Don Quixote

Miguel de Cervantes' “Don Quixote” is one of the finest books ever written. Cervantes makes us love Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. He puts that love to the test through various misadventures that seem to come from a place of fantasy. Instead, the Don and Sancho educate one another (and us) in reality through their conversations and cause otherwise hidden aspects of reality to appear.

This novel is first and foremost an image. A fifty-something year old gentleman dons anachronistic armor. He is as skinny and bony as his horse and is accompanied by a coarse and overweight peasant riding a donkey. They are frozen in winter, burning in summer, crossing the plains of La Mancha in search of adventures. The gentleman has taken to calling himself

Fiction is the main issue of the novel because the gentleman has been "unhinged" by the fantasies of chivalric romance. He believes the world to be as it is described in his novels and rushes at it looking for adventures and he endures many minor catastrophes. These events cause him to see reality, but instead he blames his misfortunes on evil enchanters that transform his feats into farces. In fact, in the end, Don Quixote triumphs; fiction infects true life and reality gives way to his fantasies. Sancho Panza, who has been introduced as a materialist and pragmatist, at last succumbs to the delights of the imaginary and, as governor of Barataria, accommodates himself to the world of falsity and illusion. His language, which at the beginning of the story is earthy and direct, becomes refined and occasionally as pretentious as that of his

We forget easier pleasures, but not those so difficult that they also comprehended severe pain. He says that “we remember the Don and Sancho, always, because they give us a difficult pleasure, in which much pain is mixed, and we love them, always, because Cervantes puts our love for them to the test.” They educate one another in reality, and in all the orders of reality. "I know who I am, and who I may be, if I choose," is the Don's