Don Quixote Essay

The first part of Don Quixote was published in 1605 to wild success. In 2005, Don Quixote was declared, after a diligent and meticulous review by literary scholars (or so I’ve been assured), to be the novel of the second millennium—the quintessential novel, that is. In the intervening 400 years, critical and mass reception to Cervantes’s work has taken a journey nearly as wild as Quixote’s. What began as a humble work of slapstick humor has become, in most eyes, a complex social and psychological exposé. The critical progression hasn’t, however, been an entirely smooth one: readers struggle to reconcile the loony, farcical Quixote of yore with the virtuous, audacious, and Romantic Quixote of today. Cervantes forces readers to grapple with

Not epic poem or treatise. One of the central components of the novel, at least the modern novel, is a degree of realism in the work. And in this respect, Don Quixote is ahead of its time. We expect novels to paint a complete picture of the external world that a character inhabits and the internal world which informs his actions and decisions. Generally, we hope that a novel can create a world of enough breadth and depth to seem, if not real, at least realistic. Cervantes’ right from the beginning creates such a world. He spares no details, especially when it comes to evaluating Quixote’s peculiar mind. We are fed clues about Quixote’s mental state: "He so buried himself in his books that he spent the nights reading from twilight till daybreak and the days from dawn till dark; and so from little sleep and amuch reading, his brain dried up and he lost his wits." While this quote doesn’t demonstrate anything remotely plausible, it does lend realism to the novel because it gives insight into what makes Don Quixote, the character, work. Other important realistic elements of Don Quixote include characters like the niece, who isn’t central to the plot but exists to add dimension to the Quixote himself. And when Cervantes made the decision to write Don Quixote’s story in prose, the language of quotidian communication, he built another layer of realism that wouldn’t be possible using

The great existentialist philosophers must have drawn from the character of Don Quixote when they enjoined man to define his own terms of existence and being. Nietzsche’s Übermensch, the idealized human who becomes “dissatisfied” with the world and its dogmas, adopts an “other-worldliness”, and transcends society to develop his own perspective on life, bears an eerie resemblance to Quixote. That other famous existentialist thinker, Jean-Paul Sartre, who said “Imagination is not an empirical or superadded power of consciousness, it is the whole of consciousness as it realizes its freedom,” would probably have worshipped Quixote as a hero. As philosophy progresses, so too does our view of Don Quixote: at first we laughed with derision, then we laughed with compassion, and then we came to realize that Quixote was humanity’s hero, our Übermensch, who we’d been searching for all along. Philosophy, especially existentialism, is indebted to Quixote, and readers are indebted to philosophy for shedding a new light on Quixote’s