At the age of fifty, a relatively poor landowner named Alonso Quixano goes insane after reading too many books about chivalry. Letting his imagination get the better of him, he decides to put on armor, take his thin sickly horse Rocinante out into the world, and become a knight errant like the ones he read about in his books. He faces windmills he believes to be giants, thinks every inn he stays at is a castle, fights random travelers in the road believing them to be knights, and ends up entering upon many misadventures. Soon he is joined by Sancho Panza, a poor peasant and neighbor of his, who hopes to become governor of an island and win riches as Don Quixote’s squire. They get involved with shepherds, dukes, landlords, Moors, soldiers, highwaymen, and other vagabonds who have fun at Don Quixote’s and Sancho’s expenses. Don Quixote’s friends and family from the village scheme to lure him home and cure him of his madness.

Due to the episodic nature of the narrative, this is the best general summary I could offer, which unfortunately eschews specific episodes. Don Quixote has to be one of the funniest novels I have ever read. It is always a good sign of a novel’s comical merit when you’re actually laughing out loud while reading it. Besides, being a success comedy and entertaining read the novel explores a lot of interesting themes.

Don Quixote is a slave to his illusions and idealism. He is a man that has read one too many books and lost his grip on reality. His imagination often slams against the limitations of reality, which he rationalizes away as enchanters persecuting him whenever discrepancies between the two arise. Like many people in the world, he prefers his illusions to reality. Related to this issue is the fine line between wisdom and insanity. Constantly in the narrative characters meeting Don Quixote for the first time are struck by his mixture of profound wisdom and stark lunacy. Rationality, intelligence, and wisdom are not monolithic things that you either have or lack. A person can be completely irrational in one area in their life (such as Don Quixote with his knight errantry or perhaps from an atheist skeptics’ point-of-view a belief in a deity) and be completely rational and full of wisdom in all other areas of their life.

The amorphous boundaries between wisdom and insanity, along with the conflict between illusions and reality, also bears relation to the question of the nature of fictional stories, which features prominently as part of the novel. Cervantes often makes comment about the nature of fiction (even playfully burning his own works in a scene where Don Quixote’s friends break into his library and burn his books in hopes of curing his insanity), in particular his narrative implies there are both good books and bad books. Good books can enlighten us about the world, but bad books can cause real damage when people take such books seriously.

Don Quixote’s problem begins when he takes the bad books meant for mere entertainment too seriously. However, another important reason he loses his grip on reality is that he leads a boring and unexceptional life. The opening chapter tells us about his lifestyle prior to his running off and stylizing himself as a knight errant. We get a sense that his everyday life was boring and lacked excitement. Essentially then Alonso Quixano suffers a midlife crisis. He reads books about knights for a little excitement, which turns his brain and makes him take the next step of actually trying to live the stories in his books.  More importantly, the novel makes pretty clear that part of the reason he becomes a knight errant is to increase his own fame and inflate his pride. This is rather ironic given the many speeches he delivers against pride and vanity to others he meets along the way, but he himself is the primary victim of this sin. The narrative implies that his adapting the ways of knight errantry, especially the underlying reasons for it, are antithetical to Christian salvation. He claims at other times he does it to help the poor and innocent, but his primary motives seem to be pride and vanity. He delivers panegyrics on being a good Christian, but up until the end he fails to play the role of the good Christian. At the end of the novel, he repents his life as knight errant.

A major question for critics has been whether Cervantes is criticizing Don Quixote’s idealism. Even though, Cervantes shows Don Quixote to be a madman and buffoon at times, and performing his deeds for the wrong reasons (his own pride, vanity, and out of boredom), the narrative suggests that some of the ideals Quixote professes as a knight are not only good, but needed to cure this hypocritical and corrupt Spain. Many of the rich characters Don Quixote meets are abusive, especially to women, the poor, and their servants. There are countless stories of nobility and landowners taking advantage of women, wheedling them into bed with promises of marriage, only to welch on their promises. These are precisely the people that knight errants are supposed to protect. Don Quixote might be a buffoon, his strong emphasis on his own fame and glory might be misguided, but the ideals themselves are needed in such a corrupt world of 16th Century Spain. And perhaps 21st century America.

Idleness is one of the major issues underlying the surface of the story. In the second part of the novel, Don Quixote meets a duke and duchess who endanger their immortal souls by playing pranks and tricks on Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. They invite the famous knight errant and his squire to stay with them so they can play tricks on them. The impression the narrative gives is that they do it because they are bored and need something new to entertain them. Later, at the very end of the novel, Don Quixote returns to the Duke’s castle where he gives a long speech to their servant Altisidora about her idleness:

“Your ladyship must learn that all the evil in the maiden arises from idleness, the remedy for which is honest and continuous occupation.”

Sancho adds:

“Maidens who have work to do spend more thought on finishing their jobs than on thinking of their loves.”

 

Don Quixote’s comments are yet another example of his advice always containing a touch of irony. I contend it is his own idleness and lack of consistent occupation of his time that makes him turn to his books of chivalry where his delusions begin and take up the life of a knight errant. Perhaps then Don Quixote’s true madness is his ability to recognize and criticize in others his own worst faults, even providing their solutions, but not being able see these character flaws in himself. The book would then be suggesting that illusions about reality and grandiose dreams about our place in it stem from a lack of self-knowledge and boredom with our lives.