Don Quixote

Part One of Don Quixote is the rare work of literature that genuinely deserves the title 'founding text': virtually every critic and major writer since the early seventeenth century has treated it as the first modern novel, and a widely publicized poll of contemporary authors voted it the greatest novel ever written. It is also, much to the surprise of many first-time readers, a comedy — an outrageous, endlessly inventive parody of chivalric romances in which a middle-aged gentleman, addled by reading too many knightly tales, sets out across the plains of La Mancha convinced he is a knight-errant. Its defining strength is the double act at its center: the gaunt, deluded knight and his rotund, earthy squire Sancho Panza, whose running dialogue balances delusion against common sense, idealism against appetite, in a way that feels modern four hundred years later.

The book's structure is loose and episodic — a picaresque string of inns, roads, and encounters rather than a single plotted arc — and that looseness is its most contested feature. Cervantes repeatedly interrupts the main narrative with lengthy embedded tales told by minor characters, most famously the 'Tale of the Curious Impertinent,' and many readers and critics have argued these digressions dilute the comic momentum; Cervantes himself, responding to such complaints, promised in the second part to keep the narrative focused on his two leads. Defenders counter that the sprawl is the point: the novel absorbs every kind of storytelling available to it, in a way that anticipates the hybrid, all-genre character of the modern novel. The pacing also runs hot and cold — some episodes are uproarious set-pieces, others move slowly and are heavy going for a modern reader without notes.

Thematically, Part One asks what happens when a person refuses to let reality dictate the story of his life. Critics have read Don Quixote as a satire of a decaying aristocratic code, as a meditation on subjective truth, and as a humane defense of the dreamer's right to dream; all three readings are plainly present, and the book's openness to such divergent interpretations is itself part of its greatness. It is also, from the first chapters, an astonishingly self-aware work of fiction — a story that keeps reminding readers it is a story, playing with lost manuscripts, fictional editors, and characters who discuss the very romances that drive the hero mad. What almost no one disputes is the ending, which closes the comedy on a note of quiet, unexpectedly touching sorrow, making it clear that beneath the slapstick, Cervantes is writing about something real.