Guide Mentor

Character Role Analysis

Books About Chivalry

Don Quixote takes advice from one place only, and that's the chivalry books he has spent most of his adult life reading. Whether it's choosing a suit of armor, punishing himself in the middle of a desert, or recommending himself to a fictional woman named Dulcinea, Don Quixote does everything he does because that's what his books have told him to do.

For Don Quixote, when reality and books don't agree, the books win. That's why you get these scenes where Don Quixote rides up to a regular roadside inn and waits for someone to let down a drawbridge that doesn't exist. In this case, his books serve as a bad guide and bad mentor, which is more or less the point of Cervantes's criticism throughout this book.