If you were to mention the simple words “Don Quixote”, most people, whether they have read the book or not, muster up images of a battered knight. This picture would not be complete without his trusty sidekick Sancho Panza. So what is it about this novel that so captures people’s imagination? Last year was the 400th anniversary of Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote and its popularity is still going strong.
The story follows the hapless Don Quixote on his many adventures. The character of Don Quixote has read too many chivalric tales and subsequently believes himself to be a real-life knight, creating his own adventures and battling the forces of evil in the world. This blurring of fact and fiction is seen in terms of narrative because “the author of this our history must be some sage enchanter.” The imagination is viewed as casting powerful spells, and indeed we, as readers, fall under the spell of Don Quixote. We enjoy the adventures as much as he does and do not wish the spell to be broken.
Quixote himself is confused by concepts of reality and fantasy. He cannot believe that “books, printed with the license of kings, and the approbation of the examiners, read with general pleasure, and applauded by great and small” should all be “lies, and especially carrying such an appearance of truth!” The priest, ever the sceptic, suggests these chivalric tales to be “all fiction, fable, and a lie, and dreams told by men awake, or, to speak more properly, half asleep”. Yet for Quixote, the more life resembles what he has read in novels, the closer it is to the truth.
Don Quixote sees windmills as giants, inns as castles and “wenches” as “beautiful damsels”. The novel reflects on the possibility of story-telling itself, arriving at a state of narrative self-consciousness. Notions of authorship preoccupy the characters throughout the novel since many of them consider writing their own histories. Books provide an imaginative outlet for characters with otherwise monotonous lives.
In Don Quixote the classic quest theme has an editorial conclusion. At the end of the journey lies the manuscript written by Cervantes. The characters become aware of the book written about them and try to alter subsequent editions. In this way, Cervantes forces us to question fundamental principles of narration. Most of the characters maintain that literature should tell the truth. Several propose that the government should practice censorship to prevent the evil falsehoods of certain books from corrupting innocent minds like Quixote’s. His niece even suggests:

“should my uncle be cured of this distemper of chivalry, he may possibly, by reading these books, take it into his head to turn shepherd, and wander through the woods and fields singing and playing on a pipe; and, what would be still worse, to turn poet, which they say is an incurable and contagious disease.”

The novel suggests that reality itself may be as unreal as Quixote’s dreams. By rooting the criticism of artistic creation in the actual creation itself, Cervantes lays claim to being one of the founders of the modern imagination. The narrator draws attention to the fact that the author is in control of what the reader sees. With: “he started up, and said– But his answer deserves a chapter by itself,” we understand that the narrator is controlling the action, restraining it by organising events into chapters. The characters themselves are aware of the storyteller that controls them.
The wave of representation recoils in upon itself in part two: now everyone in Don Quixote has read Don Quixote, and Cervantes himself must contend with the independent existence of his own creation. All the characters have now heard of the knight and his squire and, armed with this knowledge, can play jokes on them.
The novel is a parody of the medieval romance genre: a type of literature that flourished from the 12th to the 14th century. This genre was based on the perception that man was not a static object but a mobile one on a continuous spiritual journey. The Classical Roman poet Ovid had proposed during his lifetime that love was a “restless malady.” In Don Quixote the conventional quest theme has an editorial conclusion: at the end of the road lies the author’s manuscript.
Don Quixote is a text that purposely draws attention to the unreality of literature and therefore to the process of storytelling. This means that we can enjoy the novel for what it is: an enchanting story that still captures the imagination.