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Don Quixote · Part One

The Gentleman and the Windmills

Appearance and RealityLanguage and NarrationMadnessJustice and Law

Section summary

The novel of 1605 begins with a man who reads until his brain dries up and decides to live what he has read. In ten chapters, Don Quixote sets out twice: the first time, he takes an inn for a castle and gets an innkeeper who dubs him a knight as a joke; the second time, he takes along Sancho Panza, whom he promises an insula, and charges thirty windmills he sees as giants. Between the two sorties, the priest and the barber examine the library, condemn almost all of it to the fire, and wall up the room, and the housekeeper and the niece invent an enchanter to explain the disappearance, a fiction the gentleman adopts and feeds: the magician Frestón comes to answer for every refutation. The narrator, for his part, interrupts the story in the middle of a duel and says the source has run dry, and in chapter IX he finds in Toledo the notebooks of Cide Hamete Benengeli, which a Moor translates. These chapters set up the two sorties, the scrutiny, the windmills, and the manuscript, and leave ready what the book will do with them: measure, at every adventure, the distance between what the gentleman sees and what the scene shows.

Prologue

Language and Narration

Chapter summary

Miguel de Cervantes opens the book by pretending to be the stepfather, not the father, of Don Quixote, and uses the image to free the reader from any obligation of indulgence:

Analysis

Desocupado lector: sin juramento me podrás creer que quisiera que este libro, como hijo del entendimiento, fuera el más hermoso, el más gallardo y más discreto que pudiera imaginarse, idle reader, you may take my word without an oath that I would have wished this book, as the child of my wit, to be the most beautiful, the most gallant, and the most discreet that could be imagined.

The wish to have made the best book is soon contradicted: the barren wit can produce only a dry son, and the love of a father, who sees grace in his children's faults, is what he says he does not have, being a stepfather. From this he takes the reader's right, who is master in his own house as the king is of his taxes, and who can judge without fear of punishment or reward. It may be professional modesty, and it may be the first clause of the pact: here, whoever reads gives the orders.

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Chapter I: The Gentleman Who Went Mad from Reading

Madness

Chapter summary

In a place of La Mancha there lives a gentleman of some fifty years, thin, early to rise, and fond of the hunt, with a housekeeper of more than forty, a niece of under twenty, and a farmhand and errand boy who saddles the nag as easily as he handles the pruning hook. The narrator does not know for certain his surname (Quijada, Quesada, perhaps Quejana) and says it matters little, provided the narrative does not stray from the truth. The portrait opens the book with a list of worn and thin things:

Analysis

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Chapter II: The First Sortie and the Castle-Inn

Appearance and RealityLanguage and Narration

Chapter summary

Once the gear is ready, Don Quixote wants to wait no longer. He thinks his delay costs the world dearly, with so many wrongs to undo, crooked things to straighten, and debts to pay. On a hot July morning, before dawn, without telling anyone, he slips out through a back door of the yard, armed, in his cardboard helmet. As soon as he finds himself in the open country, the memory strikes him that he has not yet been dubbed a knight, and that by the law of chivalry he may not and should not measure arms with any knight. And even if he were, he would have to carry the plain arms of a novice knight and a shield without a device, until he earned them by his own effort.

Analysis

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Chapter III: The Dubbing of the Knight

Chapter summary

Anxious about not yet being a knight, Don Quixote hurries through his inn supper, locks himself in the stable with the innkeeper, and kneels before him: he will not rise until he is granted a boon, which is to be dubbed a knight the next morning, while he keeps vigil over his arms in the castle chapel. The innkeeper, who already suspected his guest's wits and is now certain, decides to play along "so as to have something to laugh at that night." He replies that such a desire is proper to gentlemen of such standing. He tells that in his youth he too roamed many parts seeking adventures (a list of disreputable quarters, of light purses, and of courted widows), and that he withdrew to that castle, where he receives knights-errant so that they may share their goods with him. There is no chapel, but arms may be watched over in any courtyard.

Analysis

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Chapter IV: Andrés, the Farmhand, and the Merchants

Justice and Law

Chapter summary

Leaving the inn at dawn, so pleased to be a dubbed knight that his joy bursts through the girths of his horse, Don Quixote recalls the innkeeper's advice about money and shirts. He decides to return home to provision himself and to find a squire, a poor neighboring farmer with children. Rocinante, who recognizes the way to the stable, trots as though he did not touch the ground. Then he hears, from a wood on the right, faint voices of someone complaining, and thanks heaven for placing so early an occasion to fulfill what he owes to his profession.

Analysis

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Chapter V: Returning Battered, Carried Home by the Neighbor

Madness

Chapter summary

Fallen on the road and unable to move, Don Quixote resorts to his usual remedy, thinking of a passage from the books, and madness brings him the romance of Valdovinos, left wounded on the mountain by Carloto, and of the Marquis of Mantua, which "boys know and young men do not ignore." Rolling on the ground, he recites the lament the wounded man makes in the wood:

Analysis

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Chapter VI: The Scrutiny of the Library

Chapter summary

With Don Quixote still asleep, the priest asks the niece for the keys to the room where the books are, which he calls the authors of the harm, and he enters with the barber, the niece, and the housekeeper. They find more than a hundred large volumes, well bound, and others smaller. The housekeeper runs out and returns with a bowl of holy water:

Analysis

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Chapter VII: The Second Sortie, with Sancho

Chapter summary

The examination is interrupted by shouts: Don Quixote has risen, is striking blows at the air, and calls to his knights in an imaginary tournament. The people of the house take him back to bed, and he, taking the priest for Turpin, archbishop of the Twelve Peers, laments that the courtly knights have taken the victory from the adventurers. Battered but not wounded, he blames Roland and promises vengeance, and then asks for food and falls asleep. That night the housekeeper burns all the books in the yard and in the house, and the narrator laments that some of them, worthy of perpetual safekeeping, burned with the others, because sometimes the righteous pay for the sinners. The priest and the barber decide to wall up the room of the books, so that he will not find them when he rises (who knows, with the cause removed, the effect may cease), and to say that an enchanter carried them off.

Two days later he goes looking for the room, feels along the wall where the door used to be, and ends up asking the housekeeper. The housekeeper and the niece repeat the lesson: it was the devil, or rather a sage who came on a cloud, mounted on a serpent, and left through the roof, filling the house with smoke, and who said, out of secret enmity toward the owner of the room, that the harm would be seen later. He said his name was Muñatón.

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Chapter VIII: The Windmills and the Biscayan

Appearance and RealityLanguage and Narration

Chapter summary

Walking across the countryside with Sancho Panza, Don Quixote discovers thirty or forty windmills, and sees in them fortune arranging their affairs better than they could wish:

Analysis

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Chapter IX: The Arabic Manuscript and the Duel

Language and Narration

Chapter summary

The narrator resumes the story at the point where he left it: the Biscayan and Don Quixote with their swords raised, about to split in two like pomegranates, and the source does not say where to find the rest. He then says, in the first person, what this cost him:

Analysis

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Chapter X: The Balsam of Fierabras

Chapter summary

Sancho Panza, mistreated by the friars' servant boys, prayed during the fight that his master would win an insula that would make him its governor. When the quarrel ends, he kneels, kisses the hand of Don Quixote, and asks him for the governorship of the insula won. His master replies that adventures like that, at a crossroads, do not yield an insula, only a broken head or one ear fewer, and that he should have patience: the real ones will come. (The title of the chapter, in Cervantes, announces the danger of a mob of Yanguesan muleteers that never appears in it.)

Analysis

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Reading of the Part

Analysis

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