Don Quixote is a middle-aged gentleman from the region
of La Mancha in central Spain. Obsessed with the chivalrous ideals
touted in books he has read, he decides to take up his lance and
sword to defend the helpless and destroy the wicked. After a first
failed adventure, he sets out on a second one with a somewhat befuddled laborer
named Sancho Panza, whom he has persuaded to accompany him as his
faithful squire. In return for Sancho’s services, Don Quixote promises
to make Sancho the wealthy governor of an isle. On his horse, Rocinante,
a barn nag well past his prime, Don Quixote rides the roads of Spain
in search of glory and grand adventure. He gives up food, shelter,
and comfort, all in the name of a peasant woman, Dulcinea del Toboso,
whom he envisions as a princess.
On his second expedition, Don Quixote becomes more of
a bandit than a savior, stealing from and hurting baffled and justifiably angry
citizens while acting out against what he perceives as threats to
his knighthood or to the world. Don Quixote abandons a boy, leaving
him in the hands of an evil farmer simply because the farmer swears
an oath that he will not harm the boy. He steals a barber’s basin
that he believes to be the mythic Mambrino’s helmet, and he becomes
convinced of the healing powers of the Balsam of Fierbras, an elixir
that makes him so ill that, by comparison, he later feels healed.
Sancho stands by Don Quixote, often bearing the brunt of the punishments
that arise from Don Quixote’s behavior.
The story of Don Quixote’s deeds includes the stories
of those he meets on his journey. Don Quixote witnesses the funeral
of a student who dies as a result of his love for a disdainful lady
turned shepherdess. He frees a wicked and devious galley slave,
Gines de Pasamonte, and unwittingly reunites two bereaved couples,
Cardenio and Lucinda, and Ferdinand and Dorothea. Torn apart by
Ferdinand’s treachery, the four lovers finally come together at
an inn where Don Quixote sleeps, dreaming that he is battling a
giant.
Along the way, the simple Sancho plays the straight man
to Don Quixote, trying his best to correct his master’s outlandish
fantasies. Two of Don Quixote’s friends, the priest and the barber,
come to drag him home. Believing that he is under the force of an
enchantment, he accompanies them, thus ending his second expedition
and the First Part of the novel.
The Second Part of the novel begins with a passionate
invective against a phony sequel of Don Quixote that
was published in the interim between Cervantes’s two parts. Everywhere
Don Quixote goes, his reputation—gleaned by others from both the
real and the false versions of the story—precedes him.
As the two embark on their journey, Sancho lies to Don
Quixote, telling him that an evil enchanter has transformed Dulcinea
into a peasant girl. Undoing this enchantment, in which even Sancho comes
to believe, becomes Don Quixote’s chief goal.
Don Quixote meets a Duke and Duchess who conspire to
play tricks on him. They make a servant dress up as Merlin, for
example, and tell Don Quixote that Dulcinea’s enchantment—which
they know to be a hoax—can be undone only if Sancho whips himself 3,300 times
on his naked backside. Under the watch of the Duke and Duchess,
Don Quixote and Sancho undertake several adventures. They set out
on a flying wooden horse, hoping to slay a giant who has turned
a princess and her lover into metal figurines and bearded the princess’s
female servants.
During his stay with the Duke, Sancho becomes governor
of a fictitious isle. He rules for ten days until he is wounded
in an onslaught the Duke and Duchess sponsor for their entertainment.
Sancho reasons that it is better to be a happy laborer than a miserable
governor.
A young maid at the Duchess’s home falls in love with
Don Quixote, but he remains a staunch worshipper of Dulcinea. Their
never-consummated affair amuses the court to no end. Finally, Don
Quixote sets out again on his journey, but his demise comes quickly. Shortly
after his arrival in Barcelona, the Knight of the White Moon—actually
an old friend in disguise—vanquishes him.
Cervantes relates the story of Don Quixote as a history,
which he claims he has translated from a manuscript written by a
Moor named Cide Hamete Benengeli. Cervantes becomes a party to his own
fiction, even allowing Sancho and Don Quixote to modify their own
histories and comment negatively upon the false history published
in their names.
In the end, the beaten and battered Don Quixote forswears
all the chivalric truths he followed so fervently and dies from
a fever. With his death, knights-errant become extinct. Benengeli
returns at the end of the novel to tell us that illustrating the
demise of chivalry was his main purpose in writing the history of
Don Quixote.
