Don Quixote

What's inside (8 sections)

1. A reader who walks out of his books
2. The first going out, alone
3. Sancho, windmills, and the road getting crowded
4. The inn where everyone meets
5. The duke and duchess and a governorship
6. The defeat that cures him
7. Key takeaways
8. FAQ

I came to Don Quixote late because the size scared me. In the Edith Grossman translation the paperback runs to 992 pages, and every reader I knew had a story about stalling somewhere in the middle. I expected a duty book, the kind you admire from a distance. What I did not expect was how funny the first hundred pages are, or how strange and sad the last hundred feel. This is a book published in two parts, the first in Madrid in January 1605 and the second in 1615, and it still reads like it was written by someone amusing himself while also settling scores.

The Spanish title on that first edition was El ingenioso hidalgo don Quixote de la Mancha. Cervantes sold the rights to the Madrid bookseller Francisco de Robles, and the printing was done by Juan de la Cuesta. That detail matters because Part 2 keeps joking about booksellers and sequels and stolen manuscripts. From the start this was a printed object that knew it was a printed object.

The premise sounds simple. A poor country gentleman reads himself mad and decides to become a knight. The execution is anything but simple. False authors show up. Characters read Part 1 inside Part 2. A fake sequel by another writer walks into the plot. By the end you are not sure who owns the story, which is exactly the point Cervantes keeps circling.

A reader who walks out of his books

Alonso Quixano lives in an unnamed village in La Mancha. He is about fifty, lean, an early riser, fond of hunting. He has a housekeeper, a niece, a broken nag in the stable, a greyhound for coursing. His income is small and fixed. His spending is not. He sells acres of farmland to buy books of chivalry, and his library fills with Amadis of Gaul and Palmerin and Belianis and all their cousins.

Cervantes spends the opening chapters letting those books take over the house. Quixano argues with the priest and the barber about which knight was greater. He stays up all night trying to make sense of tangled sentences about wounds and giants. He grows convinced that the histories are true records rather than inventions. One famous passage says his brain dried up from lack of sleep and too much reading. It is a joke about scholarship, but it lands like a diagnosis.

So he decides to repair the world. He cleans a suit of armor that belonged to his great grandfathers. He stiffens a pasteboard visor for his helmet. He renames his old horse Rocinante, a name that suggests both a hack and a champion. He renames himself Don Quixote de la Mancha. And he invents a lady to serve, since a knight without a lady is unthinkable. He picks a farm girl from a nearby town, Aldonza Lorenzo, and raises her in his mind into Dulcinea del Toboso. She never asked for the honor. She barely appears in person. That distance is part of the comedy and part of the ache.

He slips out before dawn in July without telling anyone. No squire. No money for long travel. No plan beyond imitating the books. The road is empty and hot. At a crossroads he waits to see which way Rocinante will go, because in romances knights let fate choose. That is the whole method in miniature. He will supply the script. Spain will supply everything else.

The first going out, alone

The first inn he reaches becomes, in his eyes, a castle with towers and a drawbridge. The innkeeper is the castellan. Two young women outside the door are noble damsels. The food is plain, salt pork and wine poured through cracked leather, and Quixote eats it in his armor with help because he cannot remove his helmet. Everyone stares. He speaks in high romance language. They laugh, then grow uneasy, then laugh again.

He insists on being dubbed knight that night. The innkeeper plays along to keep the peace, tells him to keep watch over his arms in the stable yard, and later taps him on the shoulder with a sword while the women gird him with comic ceremony. The book records the fees and jokes in the ledger as if this were normal business. Quixote rides off satisfied. He has received the order. The fact that it came from an innkeeper with a account book does not trouble him at all.

What follows is a run of disasters that set the pattern for the whole novel. He finds a farm boy named Andres tied to an oak and being whipped by his master Juan Haldudo over unpaid wages. Quixote intervenes in grand style, makes the master swear to pay, and rides on proud of his justice. As soon as he is gone the master beats the boy worse. Good intentions do not survive contact with power. The scene is short and it stings.

Then he stops a group of merchants from Toledo on the road and demands that they confess Dulcinea is peerless in beauty. They are tired travelers with mules to mind. One asks for proof or at least a portrait. Quixote calls it insolence. Rocinante stumbles, Quixote falls in his armor and cannot rise, and a muleteer beats him with a broken lance until he lies still. A laborer from his own village finds him, loads him across an ass like grain, and carries him home bruised and feverish.

Back home the priest Pedro Perez and the barber Master Nicholas hold an inquest over the library. They pass books out the window while the niece and housekeeper feed a bonfire. Some volumes are saved through friendship. Amadis is spared. Palmerin is spared. Others go straight into the flames. Then they wall up the room and tell Quixote an enchanter carried it away. He believes them, because enchanters explain everything that does not fit.

It would be easy to read these chapters as farce only. They are farce, but they also fix the terms. Quixote will keep imposing old stories on new people. Other people will keep paying for it.

Sancho, windmills, and the road getting crowded

For his second going out Quixote recruits help. Sancho Panza is a poor farmer from the same village, married to Teresa, father to children, practical about food and wages and weather. Quixote promises him an island to govern, as if islands were spare change. Sancho brings an ass, a bag, and a head full of proverbs. The pair make a visual joke that never quite wears out. One tall and starved on a bony horse. One short and padded on a donkey. They argue from the first mile and they never really stop.

The windmills come early. Quixote sees thirty giants on the plain and charges with his lance couched. Sancho shouts that they are mills. Quixote hears nothing. A sail strikes the lance, lifts horse and rider, and dumps them in the field. Quixote blames an enchanter for turning giants into mills at the last moment. Sancho helps him up and asks about supper. That exchange repeats in different forms for 900 pages. Evidence speaks. Quixote revises the evidence.

Soon after they meet two friars of the Benedictine order traveling ahead of a coach carrying a Biscayan lady. Quixote decides the friars have stolen a princess and attacks. Sancho loots one friar with cheerful logic about spoils of war, then gets beaten by muleteers for his trouble. Quixote picks a fight with the Biscayan squire, and the two stand with swords raised while Cervantes stops the story cold. He says the manuscript breaks off here. Then he claims to have found the rest in Toledo, written in Arabic by a historian named Cide Hamete Benengeli, bought from a boy in the street and translated in a hurry. From that point the book keeps citing its Arab author, praising him and insulting him by turns, calling him a liar when the plot needs an excuse. It is a trick, and Cervantes wants you to notice the trick.

The middle of Part 1 piles adventure on adventure without much rest. They hear fulling hammers pounding in the dark and Quixote prepares for a night battle, only to find cloth mills at dawn. He takes a barber basin for the helmet of Mambrino and wears it proudly while Sancho tries to keep a straight face. They free a chain of galley slaves being marched to the boats, because Quixote holds that no man should be punished for going hungry or loving unwisely. The leader is Gines de Pasamonte, a criminal writing his own life story. The freed men thank Quixote by stoning him and Sancho and stripping them. Sancho points out that charity has costs. Quixote answers that knights must expect ingratitude.

They hide in the Sierra Morena. There they find a suitcase with gold coins and love letters, which leads them to Cardenio, a young nobleman half mad with grief living wild in the hills. His story is pure romance material. He loved Luscinda. His friend Don Fernando betrayed him and took her. Cardenio fled to the mountains to curse and weep. Quixote decides this is the perfect place for penance in the style of Amadis. He strips to his shirt, does somersaults on the rocks, writes a love letter to Dulcinea, and sends Sancho with messages.

Sancho gets lost in his errand, as he does in most errands, and the priest and barber track him down. They hear about Dorotea, another victim of Don Fernando, a farmer daughter left ruined and hiding as a shepherd boy. They persuade her to play Princess Micomicona, a distressed lady begging Quixote to face a giant. The plan is to lure him back to the village. It works too well. Everyone starts improvising. Stories tangle. Lies breed more lies.

The inn where everyone meets

Almost the whole cast of Part 1 ends up at the same inn. It is the same low inn from the first sally, still serving bad wine and thin beds, but Cervantes turns it into a stage. Quixote sleeps in a room with skins of red wine, dreams he is fighting a giant, and slashes the skins with his sword. Wine floods the floor. He announces victory while the innkeeper counts his loss. Sancho wakes with a headache and a story.

While Quixote sleeps off his battle, the company reads aloud a manuscript left behind. It is the Tale of Ill Advised Curiosity, about Anselmo testing his friend Lothario by asking him to seduce his wife Camilla. The test destroys all three. The inn guests argue about whether the story is plausible. The priest defends printed books. Others defend pleasure. Modern readers often stall here. I lost patience on my first try and skipped ahead, then came back later. The tale has little to do with Quixote on the surface, yet it repeats his disease in city clothes. A man treats life like a test from a book. Real people bleed.

Other lost people keep arriving. A captive captain named Ruy Perez de Viedma tells of Algiers and escape with the help of Zoraida, a Moorish woman who becomes Christian for love. A judge hears the tale and turns out to be the captain brother. Don Fernando and Luscinda appear. Cardenio and Dorotea appear. Accusations fly. Forgiveness follows with suspicious speed. Cervantes loves these reunions even when they strain belief. He wants the inn to feel like a harbor where every wreck washes up at once.

Quixote contributes by refusing to join the emotion. He delivers a long speech on arms and letters, arguing whether soldiers or scholars serve the common good better. He debates a canon from Toledo about whether books of chivalry should be read at all. The canon says they are nonsense that rots judgment. Quixote answers that knights were real and slanderers will answer to heaven. Both men are intelligent. Both miss the other completely. That is often how arguments go in this book.

The return home is arranged as a cure that looks like a kidnapping. The priest and barber lock Quixote in a wooden cage on an ox cart, claim he is enchanted, and parade him across the country. Sancho walks beside the cage, half believing and half ashamed. They pass goatherds and penitents and a boy piping. Quixote preaches from bars. Villagers stare. When they reach home he is put to bed to recover. Part 1 ends with poems and epitaphs and a promise that a third sally may come. Cervantes also leaves a tease about papers found in a lead box. He was already thinking about how to keep control of his own character.

Part 1 is the louder half. It has more beatings and more crowds. It also has more padding. The interpolated stories slow the road badly. If you feel the book dragging around the inn chapters, you are reading it correctly. Keep going. The road clears.

The duke and duchess and a governorship

Part 2 begins about a month later in story time, ten years later in print. Quixote is still weak. Sancho wants wages in cash rather than islands. Teresa wants her husband home. The housekeeper and niece want the books gone. Then Sanson Carrasco arrives from Salamanca, young and clever and full of news. He has read the printed Part 1. Everyone in the village has read it. Quixote learns he is famous.

Fame changes the rules. In Part 1 people laughed because a madman interrupted their day. In Part 2 people prepare pranks in advance because they have read about him. Sanson first tries to cure him by force of arms. He rides out as the Knight of the Mirrors and loses. Later he will try again. Meanwhile Sancho is lured back with the old promise of rule, now sharpened by his wife ambition for status.

The center of Part 2 belongs to a duke and duchess who have also read Part 1. They invite Quixote and Sancho to their castle for sport. What follows is the hardest stretch to enjoy without flinching. The hosts stage enchantments with servants and trumpets. They make Sancho ride a wooden horse called Clavileno that supposedly flies through the air while bellows blow wind in their faces. They dress up beards and demand pity. They encourage Altisidora, a young maid, to pretend love for Quixote so they can watch him refuse in Dulcinea name. They send Sancho to govern a town called Barataria as a joke.

Sancho governorship is the exception, and it is wonderful. For a few chapters the joke reverses. The farmers of Barataria expect a fool and get a judge with quick instincts. He settles a dispute about a borrowed staff by breaking it open. He sees through a purse cutting trick. He eats little because a doctor named Pedro Recio keeps removing dishes for his health. He drinks plain water and issues plain orders about markets and idleness and beggars. Then the duke men stage a fake invasion with alarms at night, and Sancho, exhausted and mocked, lays down his staff and walks back to his donkey. He says ruling cost him sleep and peace. He would rather eat onions in freedom than capons in chains. It is the clearest sentence he speaks in the book, and it arrives without proverbs.

Quixote does not fare as well at the castle. He is polite and brave and completely used. The duchess asks sly questions about Dulcinea. Servants smear him with indignities. He grows stiffer as the games grow meaner. Cervantes seems aware of the cruelty. He lets Quixote keep his dignity in small refusals, and he lets Sancho see through the hosts faster than his master does. Still, these chapters run long. The humor curdles when powerful people pay poor people to perform.

Around this private theater Cervantes places his public revenge. A writer using the name Avellaneda had published a false Part 2 in Tarragona. Cervantes had seen it while writing his own. Inside the novel Quixote and Sancho meet readers of the false book and reject it. They point out errors in its portrait of them. They change their route to Barcelona partly to avoid meeting its lies. At an inn they have the false book examined and dismissed. It is petty and delightful. An author defends his characters by letting the characters defend themselves.

Other Part 2 adventures stay closer to the road. Quixote goes down into the Cave of Montesinos on a rope and reports a dream of crystal halls and enchanted knights and Dulcinea asking for money. Sancho and the guide doubt every word, and Quixote insists with unusual heat, which tells you he doubts it too. They free the puppet show of Master Peter, who turns out to be Gines de Pasamonte in disguise, and Quixote slashes the puppets to save puppets from puppets, then pays for the damage like an honest vandal. They meet Don Diego de Miranda, the Knight of the Green Coat, a calm country gentleman who keeps his life in order, and Quixote faces real lions being carried to the king. The keeper opens the cage. The lion yawns and turns away. Quixote claims victory over a beast that refused to fight. Don Diego invites him home and watches him with puzzled kindness. The wedding of Camacho brings another trick, when the poor lover Basilio fakes suicide to win Quiteria from the rich bridegroom. Quixote blesses the cheat because love outranks money. A small boat on the Ebro nearly drowns them both because Quixote treats a mill river like the sea.

Through all this Dulcinea remains absent and central. Sancho, unable to find her in El Toboso, presents three peasant girls on donkeys as Dulcinea and her ladies under enchantment. Quixote sees farm girls and smells garlic. Sancho insists the enchanters cloud his eyes. From then on the cure for Dulcinea becomes a penance laid on Sancho himself. He must give himself three thousand odd lashes to disenchant her. Sancho bargains and delays and at last cheats by whipping trees at night. The price of an ideal keeps being paid by someone else.

The defeat that cures him

Barcelona finishes what the duke castle started. Quixote and Sancho arrive in a city of printers and galleys and sea air. They visit a press where books are being set and corrected, and Quixote lectures the workmen with delight. They meet Roque Guinart, a bandit chief courteous in his own code, who protects them and returns stolen goods to show honor among thieves. They watch the galleys row out and come back. Everywhere the true Part 2 is known and the false one is mocked. Fame follows them like weather.

On the beach a strange knight in white armor challenges Quixote. He calls himself the Knight of the White Moon. His squire carries conditions. If Quixote loses he must lay down arms for a year and return to his village. They tilt. Rocinante is slow. The stranger horse is fast. Quixote falls hard in the sand. He admits defeat but refuses to deny Dulcinea beauty, offering death before dishonor in that one article. The victor spares him and rides off. Under the armor is Sanson Carrasco, back for a second try with a better plan. His trick works. The law of chivalry binds Quixote where doctors and priests failed.

The ride home is quiet. They talk of becoming shepherds and buying sheep and renaming themselves after pastoral heroes. Sancho already picks names for Teresa and their friends. Quixote plans songs to Dulcinea. It sounds gentle after so much dust. Then hares cross their path and Sancho reads omens, and Quixote, who once trusted every omen, now speaks of reason and caution. Something has shifted.

Home brings fever. Quixote takes to bed for days and wakes clear headed. He calls himself Alonso Quixano again. He curses books of chivalry for the idle hours they stole. He makes confession, dictates his will, leaves money to Sancho and to the housekeeper and niece, and asks pardon of all present. Sanson arrives with talk of fresh adventures. Quixote answers that he is done with adventures and with the name Don Quixote. He dies sane and Christian, as the narration stresses, holding to plain sense at last. Cide Hamete hangs up his pen with relief. No Avellaneda will raise this man again.

I did not expect the ending to move me. After so many beatings it would be easy to close with triumph or with scorn. Cervantes chooses something thinner. A man recovers his judgment only when judgment is no longer useful. Sancho weeps and asks who will protect the village from enchanters now. The housekeeper begs him to live. He chooses truth over comfort and pays with his life, which feels both right and wasteful. The book that mocked romances for lying ends by refusing its own best lie, that the game could go on forever.

What holds up is the friendship and the machinery. Sancho talk alone repays the effort. His proverbs pile up until they contradict each other, which is the point. He uses sayings the way Quixote uses romances, as ready answers for new problems. Watching the two systems grind against each other across 900 pages is the real plot. Around them Cervantes keeps inventing forms. Letters and poems and found manuscripts and books inside books. Readers in 1605 liked the jokes about inns and basins. Readers now may like even more the jokes about authorship. Few old books feel this aware of being read.

What drags is real too. The interpolated novels in Part 1 stop the road cold. The duke and duchess games run past fun into bullying. Some episodes repeat the same beat of mistake and beating with small changes. Sancho proverbs can weary when they come in floods. The Grossman translation helps by keeping sentences brisk and letting speakers sound distinct, but no translation shortens the long middle. My method was simple. Short sittings. Twenty pages at a time. Let the chapter breaks do their work. The book was written for pauses.

It is not for every mood. If you want tight plotting, look elsewhere. If cruel comedy at the expense of guests bothers you, the castle chapters will bother you. If you want Dulcinea to arrive and explain herself, she will not. Read it for the road talk and the slow change in both men. Quixote grows kinder as he grows less certain. Sancho grows bolder as he grows less greedy. By Barcelona they have traded qualities without noticing. That exchange is the story under the windmills.

FAQ

Is Don Quixote really the first modern novel?

Many histories call it that because Part 1 appeared in 1605 and Part 2 followed in 1615 with self aware narration, found manuscripts, and characters who have read about themselves.

Do I need to read both parts?

Yes for the full arc. Part 1 sets the beatings and the inn reunions, while Part 2 answers fame, the false Avellaneda sequel, and the defeat on the Barcelona beach.

Which translation should I pick?

The Edith Grossman translation in the Ecco paperback runs to 992 pages and keeps Sancho and Quixote distinct in plain current English.