A middle-aged country gentleman reads so many adventure stories about knights that his brain dries up, and he decides to become one. He puts on rusty armour, mounts a bony horse, and rides out to right the wrongs of the world. This is the premise of Don Quixote, published in Spain in 1605, and it is often called the first modern novel. Strip away the title and the claim is still striking: a book from four centuries ago that is genuinely funny, self-aware, and unexpectedly moving.
The man behind the book
Miguel de Cervantes was born in 1547 and lived a life that sounds like an adventure story itself. He fought at the naval battle of Lepanto in 1571 and was wounded so badly that his left hand never worked properly again. In 1575, sailing home, he was captured by pirates and held in Algiers for five years until his family raised a ransom. Back in Spain he worked as a tax collector, was jailed more than once over accounts, and published his masterpiece when he was nearly sixty. A man who had known war, captivity and debt wrote the gentlest comedy in the language.
Alonso Quijano becomes Don Quixote
The hero begins as Alonso Quijano, a minor nobleman of La Mancha. He reads chivalric romances, long stories of knights, enchanters and princesses, until he can no longer tell them from reality. He renames himself Don Quixote de la Mancha, his nag becomes Rocinante, and he picks a farm girl from a nearby village, Aldonza Lorenzo, to be his lady, Dulcinea del Toboso. She never knows of it, and Dulcinea exists mostly in his imagination.
He soon recruits a neighbour, the farmer Sancho Panza, as squire, promising him an island to govern. Sancho is practical, hungry, full of proverbs, and perfectly aware that his master is mad. And yet he follows. The pair is among the great double acts of literature. The idealist and the realist argue constantly, and by the end each has taken on some of the other.
Tilting at windmills
The phrase has entered English for a reason. In one early episode, Quixote sees thirty or forty giants on the plain and charges at them, though Sancho insists they are windmills. A turning sail knocks him off his horse. It is the best-known scene in the book, and it contains the pattern of everything that follows: Quixote interprets reality through fiction, the world answers with a thump, and he explains the thump away as the work of a wicked enchanter. The comedy is slapstick. But because we see him so clearly, we also see his courage, and the cruelty of many who trick him for amusement.
A book about books
Cervantes was doing something new. In the first chapters, the village priest and barber go through Quixote’s library and burn most of the romances, one of the earliest scenes of literary criticism in a novel. The narrator keeps shifting position. He claims that the story was taken from an Arabic manuscript by a historian named Cide Hamete Benengeli, and that he had to hire a translator. Whether to trust the narrator becomes part of the fun.
Part Two, published in 1615, is even more daring. By then Part One was a bestseller, and the characters in the second volume have read it. Duke and Duchess, who host Quixote and Sancho, have done so, and they stage elaborate pranks based on what they know. An unauthorised sequel by a writer using the name Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda appeared in 1614, and Cervantes answers it inside his own book: in Part Two, Quixote hears of a false version and deliberately changes his route to prove it wrong. Few novels have been this playful about their own existence.
- Embedded tales: Part One includes several separate stories told by travellers, including “The Curious Impertinent.”
- Different registers: Cervantes shifts between high-flown chivalric speech and rough peasant talk.
- No simple villain: the people who mock Quixote are often more foolish than he is.
The sadness under the comedy
Early readers generally took the book as a pure comedy, and for much of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that was how it was read. Romantic-era critics, especially in Germany, started to see a tragic hero instead: a man whose ideals are too large for the age. Both readings have support. Quixote is deluded, and he is also the only person in the book who acts consistently on a belief in kindness and justice. When he frees a group of chained prisoners, they stone him. His good intentions are real, and the outcome is disastrous.
The ending of Part Two is quietly devastating. Defeated by a knight in disguise, Quixote goes home, falls sick, and recovers his sanity. He renounces chivalry and dies as Alonso Quijano, and the only person who protests is Sancho, who begs him to get up and set out again. The reader who has been laughing for a thousand pages finds the sane ending the saddest one.
How it reached English
The first English translation, by Thomas Shelton, appeared in 1612, only seven years after the original. Translators since have tried to catch a style that moves between pomp and slang, and readers who find one version heavy-going often enjoy a different one. If you have been put off by a stiff translation, try another before giving up.
Why it still matters
Almost every later novel owes something to Cervantes. The idea of a hero whose worldview is tested by ordinary life, the narrator who plays with the reader, the novel that comments on novels: all appear here. More importantly, the book has the warmth that cleverness alone cannot supply. Quixote and Sancho are laughable, then dear, then irreplaceable. It is long, but the episodes are short and can be read in any order, so you do not need to commit at once. Start with the windmills, and see whether you can stop.
