Don Quixote

by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

Progress Report Number 3

December 20, 1996

I’m now in Chapter 63 of Part II (page 884 of 940) in my progress of reading Don Quixote. The most recent chapters have shown a woeful development. The Knight of the Sad Countenance has become too much so. In his more silent reflections, he perceives himself to be not receiving acclaim in his world of Knight errantry while he witnesses the promotion to "Governor of Barataria" of his squire, Sancho Panza, a man of no more worthy recommendation than that he talks too much. Witty, maybe, but certainly not of the stuff of Knight errantry.

How this can be such a pleasure to read about is a real tribute to Cervantes, the author. In a similar way, Part I’s somewhat more astounding adventures sometimes caused this reader profound sympathetic feelings of embarrassment for the extraordinary craziness, or mistakeness, or impossibility-of-success of some of the Don’s charges into action to relieve the perceived distress of another. Cervantes can really make one squirm with his artful narrative.

Don Quixote is too noble a figure to complain--even in soliloquy, but it is evident in many ways that he has become doubtful of the absolute infallibility of his actions and motives and a little hurt, too, naturally. For example, right away, in the earliest advertures of Part II, he and Sancho stay at inns without the slightest imagination that they might be Grand Castles and thinking it nothing out of the ordinary for a Knight to pay the Innkeeper for staying there rather than being granted the hospitality as an honor due a person of such an exalted occupation in life. Don Quixote even carries, or has Sancho carry, a purse full of money to allow Sancho to pay for the little mistakes the Knight makes here and there (e.g. using his sword to chop up the puppets of the performer he encounters at an inn during a play about a kidnapped lady). Never mind that it turns out the puppeteer is none other than one of the ungrateful prisoners Don Quixote freed in Part I who later led the other freed prisoners in stoning him and Sancho. In the narrative, the identity of this puppeteer appears totally obscured from Don Quixote’s perception.

Was it the ten years intervening between Parts I and II that made Cervantes show in Part II the turning of the tables in the lives of these characters in an understated, but dramatic way, that lets the reader wonder how much of what each character was, in Part I, contributed to his success or lesser fortune in Part II? Or, would the author have written Part II the same way, straight on after Part I, had he envisioned the success he was to have with its publication?

It is for certain that the appearance of a counterfeit Part II (written by someone other than Cervantes during his lifetime and published before Cervantes' Part II) played an important part in the direction of Part II, even though Don Quixote specifically tries to avoid any prediction of his exploits by that counterfeit book (Ch. 59). He changes his plan to visit Saragossa when he hears that the new history of his exploits says he had already been there. In order to "publish this modern historian's lie to the world," the Knight decides to go instead to Barcelona.

This is a book that stirs one up to applaud its deserving place among those called Great in literature.

Sancho resigns his position as governor of the isle, Barataria, after only a few days of brilliant government. Probably the worst part of it was that he had a medical doctor employed to watch his eating, at table, and to reject those things that might harm his governor’s health. Add to that the fact that Sancho had to agree to the 3,300 self-inflicted lashes for Dulcinea’s disenchantment to get the job from the Duke of their last adventure. The resulting strain is too much. Sancho's words and actions along these lines are terrific.

There’s more. I still have a few pages to go and more things to say.

© 1996 Herman Fontenot

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