Don Quixote -- Context Essay

Miguel de Cervantes was born in 1547 and died, like William Shakespeare, in April of 1616. He served in the Spanish navy for many years, eventually loosing the use of his left hand. He lived during a dramatic and intense period in Spain's history, and many of the historical circumstances he experienced influenced his writing of Don Quixote, such as pirates, Moors, prisoners, battles, and even a harsh ruler of Algiers.

The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote de la Mancha is Cervantes' most important and well-known work, and has been called one of the first modern novels due to its metafictional qualities. It is about the adventures of a Spanish nobleman who, because of reading too many tales of chivalry, comes to think that he is a knight who must combat the world's injustices. He travels with his squire, Sancho Panza, an uneducated but practical farmer. Don Quixote travels in search of adventure, championing his actions of valour to a simple country girl whom he calls Dulcinea de Toboso, seeing her as his ?lady?. His imagination usually runs away with him, and he thinks that windmills are giants, flocks of sheep are enemy armies and roadside inns are castles.

Spain was enjoying a ?golden age? of exploration and cultural and artistic flowering when Don Quixote was written and it was around here, during Cervantes life, that Spain reached the height of its European domination, funded by the gold literally pouring in from its American colonies. Don Quixote started out as a Romance about a wholly sane knight, but then ended up a satire on the thousands of medieval tales of chivalry in print at the time. The completed book is an in depth representation of Spanish life and contains many philosophical insights. However, as in all novels, some groups are silenced, the main of these in Don Quixote being females. As this Romance is about a knight, all women are therefore pictured as ?Damsels in Distress? and Chivalry rears its ugly head repeatedly with the only input to the adventures coming from men; the women are effectively marginalized.

Apart from this quite noticeable gap in the text, the reader is set to challenge the dominant cultural identity, that being Chivalry. Chivalry is a code of behavior that medieval knights followed. Chivalry was a feature of the Middle Ages in Western Europe. It died out during the 15th century, but the ideals of chivalry continued to influence models of behavior for gentlemen and the nobility during the Renaissance in the 16th century. However, this defiance of Chivalry is turned around radically at the end of the novel, where Don Quixote is dying and all those who were opposing his eccentricity throughout the novel attempt to get him to return to his gallant ways.

Even though Cervantes? outright purpose in Don Quixote was to ridicule the books of chivalry which enjoyed popularity in his day, he went beyond that with his jovial writing style and poked fun at the social and literary norms of his time. The novel exhibits over 600 minor characters in it?s plot, and uses them all to give an image of idealism perpetually at odds with the evil, meanness and logic of the real world. This is shown in the two main characters of the novel: Don Quixote and Sancho. Sancho represents reflective and commonsensical reality, whereas Don Quixote stands for whimsy and a free and open imagination. This poses the question, ?Whose view of the world is best?? Cervantes is ambiguous at best about the answer.

Don Quixote claims to have reached a ?sound philosophy? when he says ?For my absolute faith in the details of their histories and my knowledge of their features, their complexions and their deeds and their characters enable me by sound philosophy to deduce their features, their complexions and their statures.? This is yet another question posed by Cervantes: Can literature serve as a basis for understanding of reality, as Don Quixote declares? Once again, Cervantes leaves the answer up to the reader.

Another issue raised at the symbolic level is the supposed corruptive power of books. Don Quixote reads too many books of chivalry, and hence becomes infatuated with the concept of becoming a knight, with people attempting to stop him at every turn from doing so, right up to a priest who burns all of his books to stop him reading them. Herein lies what I believe to be a symbolic level of Don Quixote; that it may be a parody of the Church?s monopoly of literacy in the Middle Ages, with Quixote being the criticism of the insensitive, book-burning priest.

However, I feel that the main symbolic meaning in Don Quixote is society?s failure to accept a deviation from the norm. Cervantes deliberately did not make Don Quixote a contemptible man, nor did he make the readers challenge what Quixote was doing; he was made to be a sympathetic character throughout the story. Even though he tries to push time back to the Golden Age of chivalry, his efforts are depicted as noble, and the reader is positioned to collude and empathize with him. This sympathy that he arouses in the reader is that popular sympathy for the underdog, who defies all odds to win, and yet fails in the attempt. His idealism seems to be madness in a world that sometimes views heroism and love as forms of insanity.

Cervantes endorses many values in the text, not only those of the importance of education and the acceptance of the minority groups of society. Throughout the text many short tales are told by people met by Don Quixote during his picaresque travel. As a whole, these intercalated stories make the reader conscious of the plot: they are a break from the story, but are not totally divorced from it. Apart from the plausibility these give the story, they tell tales of love, loss, and heartbreak, and give many morals and values to the reader.

The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote de la Mancha has been called one of the greatest works known to man, and is the first modern novel. It supports the concept of idealism perpetually at odds with the evil, meanness and logic of the real world, and positions the reader to collude with this ethic. This subject matter is an ideal that should be always cherished by the world, as if we do not accept a deviation from the norm we will never be able to accept anything. Don Quixote is a novel of the greatest standard, and is a representation of values that we must appreciate.