Five-minute digest
Don Quixote
Summary
The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha was published in two parts, in 1605 and 1615. An impoverished hidalgo of about fifty, Alonso Quixano, reads chivalric romances until, from too little sleep and too much reading, his brain dries up and he loses his wits. Believing himself a knight-errant, he renames himself Don Quixote, polishes old armour, calls his bony horse Rocinante, and chooses as his lady a peasant girl from a nearby village whom he names Dulcinea del Toboso. On his first sally he is 'knighted' by a mocking innkeeper and soundly beaten. His friends, the priest and the barber, burn most of his library, but he sets out again with a credulous, earthy, illiterate neighbour, Sancho Panza, as his squire, promising him the governorship of an island. Their adventures follow: Don Quixote attacks windmills he takes for giants, charges flocks of sheep he thinks are armies, frees a chain of galley slaves who then stone him, and drinks his own miraculous 'balsam of Fierabras', which makes both men violently sick. Part One weaves in interpolated tales of love and betrayal, including the stories of Cardenio and Dorotea and the novella 'The Curious Impertinent', and ends with the priest and barber bringing the knight home in a cage on an ox cart. In Part Two, written partly in response to a spurious continuation by 'Avellaneda', Don Quixote and Sancho find that Part One has been published and that people know of them. Sancho deceives his master into believing that a coarse peasant girl is Dulcinea under enchantment. A Duke and Duchess who have read the book entertain the pair and stage elaborate hoaxes for their amusement, including making Sancho governor of the 'island' of Barataria, where he judges cases with surprising wisdom but is starved by a court physician before resigning. Don Quixote descends into the Cave of Montesinos and reports marvellous visions. Finally, at Barcelona, he is defeated by the Knight of the White Moon, actually his neighbour Sansón Carrasco, and must give up knight-errantry for a year. He returns home, falls ill with fever, recovers his reason, renounces the books of chivalry as Alonso Quixano the Good, makes his will and dies, mourned by Sancho, who begs him to rise and take up a new life as a shepherd.
Top Lessons
Reading shapes reality
Don Quixote's madness begins in books, and the novel is constantly about how stories govern perception. Cervantes asks what happens when we live by the narratives we consume.
Idealism and realism need each other
Quixote and Sancho influence each other: Sancho grows more imaginative and Quixote more aware. The novel suggests that a full life needs both vision and practicality.
Mockery can be cruel
The Duke and Duchess's elaborate jokes at Quixote's expense reveal more about their cruelty than about his folly. Cervantes invites sympathy for the deluded.
Verified Quotes
Frequently cited
“In a village of La Mancha, the name of which I have no desire to call to mind, there lived not long since one of those gentlemen that keep a lance in the lance-rack, an old buckler, a lean hack, and a greyhound for coursing”
Frequently cited
“In short, he became so absorbed in his books that he spent his nights from sunset to sunrise, and his days from dawn to dark, poring over them; and what with little sleep and much reading his brains got so dry that he lost his wits”
Frequently cited
“Fortune is arranging matters for us better than we could have shaped our desires ourselves, for look there, friend Sancho Panza, where thirty or more monstrous giants present themselves”
Medical Lens
Probably the most influential portrait of madness in Western fiction and a staple of medical humanities. Cervantes's explanation of Quixote's insanity (reading and sleeplessness drying the brain) draws on humoral theory as developed in Juan Huarte de San Juan's Examen de ingenios (1575), which linked a hot, dry brain to imaginative and choleric temperaments. Quixote's delusions are circumscribed, coexisting with lucid, eloquent reasoning on other subjects, and the book's characters debate whether he is mad, a type later described as monomania. The balsam of Fierabras (Part I, Ch. 17) parodies miraculous cures and causes violent vomiting. In Part II, Dr Pedro Recio de Agüero forbids Governor Sancho nearly every dish on dietetic grounds, a sharp satire of court physicians and regimen. Quixote's final illness, a fever brought on, the narrator suggests, by melancholy at his defeat, ends with a recovery of reason before death. Retrospective diagnoses (from bipolar disorder to delusional disorder or dementia) are a popular exercise but should be treated as readings.
- Part I, Ch. 1
Little sleep and much reading dry Alonso Quixano's brain until he loses his wits.
- Part I, Ch. 8
The windmills taken for giants, the most famous image of delusion in literature.
- Part I, Ch. 17
Don Quixote brews and drinks the balsam of Fierabras; he and Sancho are violently sick.
- Part II, Ch. 22–23
Descent into the Cave of Montesinos and Quixote's report of dream-like visions.
- Part II, Ch. 47
As governor of Barataria, Sancho is denied his meals by the physician Pedro Recio de Agüero.
- Part II, Ch. 74
Don Quixote falls into a fever, sleeps, wakes sane, renounces chivalry and dies.