Don Quixote the Man of La Mancha
I read Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, otherwise known simply as Cervantes. ... The man of La Mancha is the tale of an aging Spanish gentleman, who driven to insanity by too many books about knights, but Don Quixote is a man of action, so I took my grandfather’s suit of armor out of storage and had it cleaned, and set out to be a knight. ... This being done, I took another eight days to come up with a suitably knightly appellation for myself, and finally settled on Don Quixote de la Mancha. ... This ends the first part, and the second begins, apparently several years later, accounting for the interim between the two parts, during which, Don Quixote has acquired much fame, and Cervantes exhibits this in the second part in which Quixote’s reputation precedes him wherever he goes. Welcome back to part two of Don Quixote. The second part of the story begins with Sancho and I, the man of la Mancha, embarking on a new series of adventures. ... In the end, the beaten and battered Don Quixote renounces all of the chivalric truths which he had held so dear, except for the his allegiance to the lady Dulcinea, which he holds fast to until he dies of a fever. ... I am going to attempt to clarify the plot a little, by pointing out some specific examples of Don Quixote’s lunacy. ... The farm boy that he rescues has his beating continued as soon as Don Quixote leaves. ... As the novel progresses, Don Quixote, with the help of his faithful squire, Sancho, slowly learns to distinguish between reality and his fantasy, but nevertheless, until his final sanity inducing illness, he holds fast to his chivalric beliefs. Some of the themes present in Don Quixote are the foolishness of an adherence to one strict code, in this case, chivalry. The danger of fiction, that is the catalyst that provoked Quixote to go insane from what he perceived as real, blurring the line between reality and his fancified lunacy. But most of all, Don Quixote was written as a parody, criticizing the antiquated practices of the chivalric era, and as such, purports these values as idiotic, frivolous, and in Don Quixote’s case, the insane. Critical Review: I have to agree with the critic in saying that yes, Don Quixote was a failure in it’s purpose, because I wholeheartedly empathize with the crazed man of la mancha, because his idealized view of the world is so much more appealing than his contemporary settings in reality.