Don Quixote
Knight of the sad countenance, mad with books and stubborn with honor.
Renaissance · Novel · 1605 / 1615
Don Quixote
Miguel de Cervantes
A country gentleman reads too many chivalric romances and rides out to repair the world. Reality keeps interrupting, and the interruption becomes the novel.
Comic romance
Characters
Sancho Panza
Squire whose proverbs and hunger ground the dream without quite killing it.
Themes
Fiction and life
Reading remakes the reader; the book knows it is doing this.
Idealism
The joke is tender: a worn world still needs someone to see giants.
Motifs
Every ordinary room is misread as a castle.
Part Two even meets readers of Part One.