Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, and literary
devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes.
Honor
Some characters in Don Quixote show a
deep concern for their personal honor and some do not. Cervantes
implies that either option can lead to good or disastrous results.
Anselmo, for example, is so overly protective of his wife’s honor
that he distrusts her fidelity, which ultimately results in her
adultery and his death. Likewise, Don Quixote’s obsession with his
honor leads him to do battle with parties who never mean him offense
or harm. On the other hand, Dorothea’s concern for her personal
honor leads her to pursue Ferdinand, with happy results for both
of them. In these examples, we see that characters who are primarily
concerned with socially prescribed codes of honor, such as Anselmo
and Don Quixote, meet with difficulty, while those who set out merely
to protect their own personal honor, such as Dorothea, meet with
success.
Other characters, especially those who exploit Don Quixote’s madness
for their own entertainment, seem to care very little about their
personal honor. The Duke and Duchess show that one’s true personal
honor has nothing to do with the honor typically associated with
one’s social position. Fascination with such public conceptions
of honor can be taken to an extreme, dominating one’s life and leading
to ruin. Sancho initially exhibits such a fascination, confusing
honor with social status, but he eventually comes to the realization
that excessive ambition only creates trouble. In this sense, Cervantes
implies that personal honor can be a powerful and positive motivating
force while socially prescribed notions of honor, which are often
hollow and false, can be destructive if adhered to obsessively.
Romance
Though many people in Don Quixote’s world seem to have
given up on romantic love, Don Quixote and a few other characters
hold dear this ideal. Don Louis’s love for Clara, Camacho’s wedding,
and the tale of the captive and Zoraida, for instance, are all situations
in which romantic love rises above all else. Even in the case of
Sancho and Teresa, romantic love prevails as a significant part
of matrimonial commitment, which we see in Teresa’s desire to honor
her husband at court. Ironically, Don Quixote’s own devotion to
Dulcinea mocks romantic love, pushing it to the extreme as he idolizes
a woman he has never even seen.
Literature
Don Quixote contains several discussions
about the relative merits of different types of literature, including
fiction and historical literature. Most of the characters, including
the priest and the canon of Toledo, ultimately maintain that literature
should tell the truth. Several even propose that the government
should practice censorship to prevent the evil falsehoods of certain
books from corrupting innocent minds like Don Quixote’s. However,
we see that even the true histories in the novel end up disclosing
falsehoods. Cervantes declares that Don Quixote itself
is not fiction but a translation of a historical account. The fact
that we know that this claim of Cervantes’s is false—since the work
is fictional—makes Cervantes’s symbolism clear: no matter how truthful
a writer’s intentions may be, he or she can never tell the whole
truth. Despite these inherent flaws, however, literature remains
a powerful force in the novel, guiding the lives of many characters,
especially Don Quixote. Notions of authorship and storytelling preoccupy
the characters throughout the novel, since many of them consider
the idea of writing their own histories as their own narrators.
