Key themes
- Idealism and delusion
- Fiction and reality
- The comedic and the tragic
About this book
An elderly Spanish gentleman, his mind disordered by too many chivalric romances, sets out as a knight errant with his pragmatic squire Sancho Panza to do good and restore justice to the world. Cervantes's novel — often called the first modern novel — plays the idealist and the pragmatist against each other in ways that have sustained 400 years of interpretation.
Published in two parts (1605 and 1615), Don Quixote is widely considered the first modern novel. Cervantes himself came to writing relatively late, after a life of adventure and poverty.
Discussion questions
- Don Quixote reads too many chivalric romances and decides to become a knight. Is he mad, deluded, or in some sense admirable for refusing to accept the world as it is?
- Sancho Panza begins as a practical foil to Quixote's idealism but gradually absorbs some of his master's worldview. What does this gradual transformation say about the relationship between dreams and reality?
- The novel is often described as the first modern novel partly because it is so self-aware about being a novel — it contains references to its own earlier publication. How does this metafiction change your experience of reading it?
- At what moments did you find Quixote's delusions genuinely funny, and at what moments genuinely sad? How does Cervantes manage to make the same scenes work both ways?
- The novel was published in two parts, seventeen years apart. Does the second part — in which characters have already read the first — feel different to you, and what does Cervantes gain from this?
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