The Themes Of Picaresque In Don Quixote Of La Mancha

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Don Quixote is a chivalric nobleman, a lover, a fighter, a hopeless romantic, a mad man, and a knight errant. The story of Don Quixote of La Mancha perfectly depicts picaresque. Picaresque is a fictional style of writing that takes heroes on adventures and shows the audience the different levels of society Don Quixote goes through. The picaresque theme of this story shows how ones’ fantasy, Don Quixote, becomes reality; therefore, leading others who follows Don Quixote into his reality as well. “In short, our gentleman became so caught up in reading that is spent his nights reading from dusk till dawn and his days reading from sunrise to sunset, and so with too little sleep and too much reading his brains dried up, causing him to lose his mind” (Cervantes, 2013, p. 21). Don Quixote is determined to leave his life of a nobleman and spend his days fulfilling the role of a chivalric knight he reads about. Aspiring to fulfill the role, like any knight in the novels he reads, a knight needs a squire and with much persuading Don Quixote convinced his good neighbor Sancho to go on adventures with him with the promise of Sancho becoming a governor. Don Quixote’s adventures and reasoning leaves the audience questioning if Don Quixote’s fantasy is in actuality, reality. “His fantasy filled with …show more content…

Sancho, whom at first, has a firm gasp of reality still follows and defends Don Quixote on his adventures, despite knowing he can never become a governor. Sancho has now moved away from the real reality into Don Quixote’s reality. As Sancho goes on more adventures with Don Quixote he enjoys being a squire, and finds being Don Quixote’s squire is much more of a reality than being a farmer. Referring back to the question, “Can fiction become fact?” Yes. It is no longer fiction when the outcome is potentially factual. Don Quixote puts himself and Sancho in real situations that have real

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