Don Quixote Analysis

For the most part, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza spend all of the novel in one of two places, an inn or the Spanish countryside. When it comes to describing the Spanish countryside, it's Cervantes's...

Throughout this book, Cervantes uses multiple layers of narrators. For starters, there's Cervantes himself, who speaks to us in his Author's Prefaces that begin Parts 1 and 2 of the book. Further,...

The genre of Don Quixote is one of the most interesting things about it, since Miguel de Cervantes wrote the novel as a satire of another, pre-existing literary genre. This is why we call this book...

From the beginning, it is clear that Miguel de Cervantes thinks that Don Quixote's efforts to be a knight are foolish. He tells us early on, in fact, that his title character "unluckily stumbled up...

So what do we mean by something as fancy-sounding as "humorously grandiose"? Well, we basically mean that Cervantes makes his writing really fancy in order to make fun of the most popular literary...

It's fitting that the title of this book isn't a real name, but rather the fake name that Alonso Quixano takes on when he decides to become a wandering knight. Over the centuries since its publicat...

"As for me, I must esteem myself happy, to have been the first that rendered those fabulous nonsensical stories of knight-errantry, the object of the public aversion. They are already going down, a...

The language is dated, and you might have a hard time paying attention to Don Quixote's long, long speeches about knighthood. But if you sit down and give this book your full attention, you should...

Setting OutWhen we first meet Don Quixote, he's a fairly wealthy older gentleman with a little too much time on his hands. His favorite thing to do with his free time is read adventure books that h...

Of course Cervantes would write Don Quixote as a quest story: Don Quixote himself tries to base his life on all the knights' quests he has read about over the years. He first hears the "call of kni...

We meet a wealthy older man named Alonso Quixano, who is really obsessed with adventure fiction. He's so into it, in fact, that he dresses up as a knight one day and rides off into the countryside...

Alonzo Fernandez de Avellaneda (the guy who wrote the phony sequel to Don Quixote) wasn't the only dude to knock off Don Quixote in Cervantes's time. He's just the only one Cervantes chose to reall...

Upon his honor, Don Quixote has sworn to be chaste until he can be with his beloved Dulcinea. But that doesn't mean that all the other characters have done the same. Don Fernando, Dorotea, Doña Ro...

Garci Rodriguez de Montalvo. "Amadis de Gaul" (1.1.1.4)Miguel de Cervantes, "The Galatea" (1.1.6.7)Bernardo de la Vega, "The Shepherd of Iberia" (1.1.6.7)Joannot Martorell, "Tirante el Blanco" (1.1...