Don Quixote by Cervantes

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Don Quixote by Cervantes
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Don Quixote

• Author Miguel de Cervantes
• Culture Spanish
• Date early 17th c.
• Genre satirical novel
• Names/terms to know Don Quixote, Sancho Panza,
  Dulcinea, Sansón Carrasco, Marcela, Grisóstomo,
  chivalry pastoralism

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Cervantes Background

• Son of a poor doctor, did not have a humanist
  education
• Cervantes adventurous life
• Fought in religious wars
• Captured by pirates
• Spent 5 years as a slave
• Held government jobs.
• 1604 Don Quixote Part 1 published
• 1615 published DQ II.

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Don Quixote

• Cervantes combines several genres into one.
• His initial purpose to satirize the romances of
  chivalry, to create a parody of a literary type
  characterized by supernatural deeds of valor,
  implausible complicated adventures, duels, and
  enchantments.
• The novel was popular immediately.

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Medieval Chivalry Pastoral

• The literature that had expressed the medieval
  spirit of chivalry and romance had degenerated by
  Cervantes time.
• His method of showing the inherent silliness of
  chivalric romances to show what extraordinary
  consequences they would lead a man insanely
  infatuated with them, once this man set out to
  live now according to their patterns of action
  and belief.
• In addition to chivalric romances, Cervantes
  parodies the pastoral novel, with the section
  about Marcela, the shepherdess who is unmoved by
  her shepherd admirers.

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Don Quixotes Mask

• Our hero, Don Quixote, dons the mask of a
  chivalric knight to make his life more
  interesting and bearable.
• We can see the influence of Greek comedy on this
  novel a crazy idea is proposed, and the rest of
  the work concerns its working out in the real
  world.
• The humor lies in the contrast between Don
  Quixotes ideals and the real world around him.
• French Jesuit Francois de la Noue - Warned
  against the dangerous influence of chivalric
  books on the young - claimed they were as harmful
  to the young as Machiavelli was to the old.
  Think also Socrates

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Reality

• Don Quixote is not a knight but an impoverished
  country landowner.
• His ideals love as service, adventurousness,
  loyalty to valor and generosity. Tries to seek
  out wrongs and right them, to help those in need,
  to be full of valor in honor of his Lady (courtly
  love).
• Like Greek heroes, he wants his great deeds to be
  sung.
• Don Quixote a wandering hero
• His insanity caused by reading too many books
  about chivalry (literature corrupts)

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First Nine Chapters

• Some scholars think these chapters represent the
  kernel of a story originally meant to be just a
  novella.
• The story breaks off soon after DQ has taken off
  again with Sancho Panza as his squire, fresh from
  their windmill encounter.