Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes: A Summary of the First Modern Novel
What Don Quixote is about
Miguel de Cervantes published Don Quixote in two parts, in 1605 and 1615, writing in Early Modern Spanish. It is widely regarded as a founding work of Western literature and as the first modern novel. It is also one of the most translated books in the world and one of the best selling in history.
The story begins with Alonso Quixano, a member of the lowest rank of nobility, an hidalgo, living frugally in an unnamed part of La Mancha with his niece and his housekeeper. He is nearing fifty. He has read so many chivalric romances that the reading has taken over his life. He decides to become a knight errant himself, to revive chivalry and serve his nation. He puts on an old suit of armour, renames himself Don Quixote de la Mancha, renames his worn out workhorse Rocinante, and chooses a lady to serve. She is Aldonza Lorenzo, a slaughterhouse worker famed for her hand with salted pork, whom he renames Dulcinea del Toboso.
On his first journey out he reaches an inn and takes it for a castle. He calls the prostitutes there ladies and demands that the innkeeper, whom he takes for the lord of the castle, dub him a knight. The innkeeper plays along to be rid of him. Quixote holds vigil by the horse trough, which he imagines is a chapel, and fights the muleteers who try to move his armour so they can water their mules. He then tries to rescue a beaten servant boy, Andres, with the result that the beating resumes and worsens the moment he rides away. He picks a fight with traders from Toledo over Dulcinea's beauty, falls from his horse, is thrashed, and is carried home by a neighbour. While he lies unconscious, his niece, his housekeeper, the parish curate and the village barber burn most of his books, though they keep stopping to rescue the ones they like too much to destroy. They seal up the library and tell him a wizard did it.
He goes out again, this time with a squire. The windmills he charges, believing them to be giants, come early in this second journey. There follow Benedictine friars mistaken for enchanters, an armed Basque, goatherds, porters, a brawling night at an inn owned by Juan Palomeque, a dead body, a group of galley slaves, and a barber's basin that Quixote is certain is the legendary helmet of Mambrino. In the Sierra Morena the pair meet Cardenio, who is himself mostly mad and tells his story. Inspired, Quixote decides to live as a hermit to prove his devotion to Dulcinea and sends his squire off with a letter for her.
The main characters
Don Quixote himself does not see the world as it is and does not want to. He prefers to believe he is living a knightly story that will be recorded for all time. Sancho Panza, the poor farm labourer he recruits as his squire with the promise of a governorship, is the counterweight. Sancho is earthy, practical and funny, and his plain speech keeps colliding with his master's high rhetoric. The critic Salvador de Madariaga described the two forces at work across the book as Quixotization and Sanchification: Sancho's spirit rises from reality towards illusion while Don Quixote's travels the other way.
Around them stand the villagers who want Quixote cured: the niece, the housekeeper, the curate and the barber. Dulcinea, the lady at the centre of it all, exists mostly as an idea. Cervantes also inserts himself playfully, claiming the opening chapters came from the archives of La Mancha and the rest was translated from an Arabic manuscript by a Moorish historian, Cide Hamete Benengeli.
The themes
Madness is the obvious one, but the book is more interested in what madness is for. Quixote has chosen his delusion. It gives a dull life a shape, a name and a purpose. Identity runs alongside it, since almost everything in the novel gets renamed: the man, the horse, the woman, the inn, the basin. Reading itself is on trial. The books are blamed for the illness and then half saved by the people burning them, which is a joke Cervantes clearly enjoyed. And there is the gap between intention and result. Quixote frees the servant boy and makes his life worse.
Why it still matters
The novel shaped what came after it. It is referenced directly in nineteenth century French literature, in Alexandre Dumas's The Three Musketeers (1844) and Edmond Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac (1897). It gave English the word quixotic, meaning impractically idealistic. Mark Twain credited it with sweeping the world's admiration for medieval chivalry out of existence. Some have called it the greatest work ever written.
How part one moves towards its close
Sancho never reaches Dulcinea. He runs into the barber and the priest from his own village instead, and they hatch a plan to lure Quixote home. They recruit a woman they find in the forest, Dorotea, to pose as a damsel in distress called the Princess Micomicona, on the reasoning that Quixote cannot refuse a lady in need. The trick works on him exactly as they hoped.
