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Don Quixote · Part Two

The Printed Book

Appearance and RealityLanguage and NarrationHonor and ReputationMadness

Section summary

Ten years after the 1605 book, and a little over a month after the gentleman's return to the village, the book already exists inside the book. In the prologue, Cervantes answers an apocryphal Quixote without naming his rival, and in the chapters that follow, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza learn, from the mouth of the bachelor Sansón Carrasco, that the First Part is circulating in print, with flaws readers have already noted: the donkey that reappears without explanation, the novella out of place, the hundred escudos forgotten. The priest and the barber test the gentleman's cure and see it refute itself within minutes; the bachelor, who has agreed with them on a plan to send him out on the road again, pretends to push him onto it. Sancho is no longer the squire of a promise: he bargains over wages with his master and over his daughter's future with Teresa. The part ends in El Toboso, where he, not knowing where Dulcinea del Toboso lives, turns a farm girl into the lady and begins to manufacture the illusion he had previously only watched from outside. The question the book leaves is who controls the fiction once everyone has read it.

Prologue

Language and Narration

Chapter summary

Cervantes opens the 1615 volume by addressing a reader, "illustrious or plebeian," who expects from him vengeance and reproaches against the author of the second Don Quixote, the one who, he says, "was engendered in Tordesillas and born in Tarragona." This is the apocryphal Quixote of 1614, signed by Avellaneda, whom Cervantes never names. He denies the reader the pleasure of a quarrel and tells what in fact wounded him: being called old and one-handed, envious, and the author of novels more satirical than exemplary. He raises his tone only to refuse the rival's tone:

Analysis

Quisieras tú que lo diera del asno, del mentecato y del atrevido, pero no me pasa por el pensamiento: castíguele su pecado, con su pan se lo coma y allá se lo haya, you would like me to call him an ass, a dolt, and an upstart, but that does not even cross my mind: let his sin punish him, let him eat his own bread and be on his way.

Cervantes lists the insult he says he will not use and, in listing it, uses it. The reader receives the fight he expected and its refusal in the same sentence, and the rival is left to his own sin. Two readings: the serenity of someone who considers himself above the matter, or a deeper blow, because not answering reduces the apocryphal author to a writer who does not even deserve a reply.

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Chapter I: The Gentleman Visited

Madness

Chapter summary

Cide Hamete Benengeli, the historian whom Cervantes pretends to follow, relates that the priest and the barber went almost a month without seeing Don Quixote, so as not to stir up his memories, but they visited the niece and the housekeeper and asked them to treat him with good foods for the heart and the brain, from which, in the opinion of the two, all the misfortune came. The women say that the gentleman shows signs of sound judgment every hour, and the visitors rejoice, convinced that they were right to bring him home enchanted in the oxcart, as was told in the last chapter of the First Part. They decide to test the improvement and agree not to touch on knight-errantry, so as not to unpick the stitches of his wound, which are still so tender.

Analysis

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Chapter II: The Door and the Question of Fame

Honor and Reputation

Chapter summary

The cries that the priest, the barber, and Don Quixote heard came from the door: the niece and the housekeeper of Don Quixote bar the entrance to Sancho Panza, accusing him of being the one who leads the master astray and lures him off along these godforsaken paths. Sancho returns the accusation: it was his master who took him from home with enticements, promising him an insula, which he is still waiting for. The niece asks what an insula is, whether by chance it is something to eat, and Sancho answers:

Analysis

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Chapter III: The Bachelor and the Printed Book

Language and Narration

Chapter summary

Don Quixote waits for the bachelor pensively. He is not persuaded that a history of himself already exists, "since the blood of the enemies he had slain was not yet dry on his sword blade," and he imagines that some sage, friend or enemy, printed it by enchantment: if a friend, to exalt it; if an enemy, to debase it, although no feat of a squire has ever been written down. The consolation he finds is that, being about a knight-errant, the history must be grandiloquent, lofty, distinguished, magnificent, and true; the discomfort is that the author is a Moor, judging by Cide, and from Moors no truth can be expected, because they are all embellishers, forgers, and fantasists. He fears that his love for Dulcinea del Toboso has been treated with some indecency, to the detriment of her honor, and he wishes the history would declare the fidelity and decorum he has always kept toward her, scorning queens, empresses, and damsels.

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Chapter IV: Sancho's Accounts and the Third Sally

Chapter summary

Sancho returns to the house of Don Quixote and answers the bachelor's questions about the donkey. He tells that, on the night they fled from the Holy Brotherhood toward the Sierra Morena, after the galley slaves and the dead man from Segovia, he slept so heavily that someone set four stakes under his packsaddle and took the grey donkey from beneath him without his feeling it; he woke on the ground, wept, and made a lament that, if the author did not include it, "may be counted as not having included anything good." Don Quixote recalls Sacripante, from whom the thief Brunello did the same with his horse at the siege of Albraca. Days later, returning with the princess Micomicona, Sancho recognized the ass under Ginés de Pasamonte, dressed as a gypsy. Sansón Carrasco points out what interests him:

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Chapter V: Sancho and Teresa

Chapter summary

The chapter opens with a warning from the translator of the Arabic manuscript: he judges it apocryphal, because in it Sancho speaks in a style and says things too subtle for his short wit, but he did not want to leave it untranslated, since that was what his office required of him. Sancho Panza arrives home so cheerful that Teresa Panza sees his joy from a crossbow's shot away. He explains, in his roundabout way, that he would be better off if God willed that he were not so content: he has decided to go back to serving his master, who wants to set out for the third time, because necessity pushes him and the hope of finding another hundred escudos cheers him, but it grieves him to leave his wife and children. Teresa notes that since Sancho became a member of knight-errantry he speaks in such a roundabout way that no one understands him. He orders the grey ass's ration doubled and the packsaddle and harnesses checked, because they will roam the world and deal with giants, endriagos, and monsters, and Teresa replies that squires-errant do not eat their bread for free.

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Chapter VI: The Niece, the Housekeeper, and the Lineages

Honor and Reputation

Chapter summary

While Sancho and Teresa discuss the marriage of Mari Sancha, the niece and the housekeeper of Don Quixote perceive by a thousand signs that the uncle wants to set out for the third time, and they try by every means to turn him from the idea, all in vain. The housekeeper threatens to complain to God and to the king; Don Quixote answers that if he were king he would be excused from answering the many impertinent petitions they hand him, and that one of the greatest labors of kings is being obliged to listen to and answer everyone. The housekeeper asks whether there are no knights in His Majesty's court, and why he would not be one of those who serve their king standing still; he separates the two orders: courtiers travel the world looking at a map, without spending a penny or feeling heat or cold, while true knights-errant measure the earth with their own feet, in sun, cold, and wind, know their enemies in their being and not painted, and do not attend to the minutiae of the laws of challenge. The good knight-errant, he says, is not frightened by ten giants with heads in the clouds, and must attack them with an intrepid heart. He concludes that there is no prince who should not esteem more highly this species, which was once the health of a kingdom, or of many.

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Chapter VII: The Salary That Does Not Exist

Chapter summary

The housekeeper, seeing Sancho lock himself in with the master, grasps what is afoot and runs after the bachelor Sansón Carrasco, because he is a glib talker and a friend of the master's, so that he may dissuade him. She finds him strolling in the courtyard, throws herself at his feet, and tells him that the master "is going out" through the door of madness: this is the third sally, and she recalls that the first time they brought him back draped across a donkey, beaten with sticks, and the second time in an oxcart, caged, so thin and yellow that his mother would not have known him, and that she spent more than six hundred eggs to bring him back to his senses. Carrasco sends her home to prepare a hot lunch for him and to say the prayer of Saint Apollonia (which is for the teeth, and she retorts that the master's ailment is in his hooves), and goes to find the priest. The bachelor already has a plan, which the narrator reveals only at the end of the chapter: everything was arranged with the priest and the barber to persuade the gentleman to set out again.

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Chapter VIII: On the Road to Toboso, Fame and Sainthood

Chapter summary

Cide Hamete Benengeli opens the chapter by blessing Allah three times for seeing the two already on campaign, and asks readers to forget the past chivalries of the ingenious gentleman and fix their eyes on those to come, which "begin on the road to Toboso as the others began on the fields of Montiel." Alone since Carrasco withdrew, Rocinante neighs and the grey ass sighs, and although the grey ass's sighs and brays outnumber the nag's neighs, Sancho infers that his fortune will surpass his master's, by some judicial astrology that the narrator says he has not declared. Don Quixote wants to go to Toboso before any other adventure, to take the blessing and leave of Dulcinea del Toboso, because nothing makes knights-errant braver than finding themselves favored by their ladies. Sancho Panza observes that it will be hard to speak with her, except from the corral fence where he saw her the first time, when he carried her the letter; Don Quixote is scandalized: they were not corral fences, they were galleries, corridors, or halls of a rich royal palace. Sancho insists: fences they seemed to him, and the sun of Dulcinea was not clear because the dust from the wheat she was sifting made a cloud before her face. The master answers that it is impossible for Dulcinea to have been sifting wheat, a task not suited to people of rank, and gives the explanation:

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Chapter IX: The Night in Toboso

Chapter summary

At midnight they enter El Toboso, which sleeps in a silence broken only by barking, braying, grunting, and mewing. The night is half-clear, and Sancho wished it wholly dark, so as to find in the darkness an excuse for his folly. Don Quixote orders him to guide him to the palace of Dulcinea del Toboso; Sancho Panza answers that the house where he saw her was small, and the master bends the fact to his belief: she must be withdrawn in an apartment of her alcázar, taking her ease with the maidens. Sancho objects that it is not the hour to knock at the door, as lovers do, and the master, who makes out a great mass, guides on: after some two hundred paces, the mass is a tower, and the building is not an alcázar but the main church. "We have run into the church, Sancho." Sancho answers that it is no good sign to walk among cemeteries at that hour, and that he had said the lady's house stands on a dead-end lane; Don Quixote calls him a madman and asks where he found royal palaces built on dead-end lanes, and Sancho replies: "in every land, its own custom." He asks to be left to search alone through the streets and alleys, and the master asks him to show respect for the affairs of his lady. Then Sancho lets out what troubles him most: how can the master expect him, who saw the house only once, to find it at midnight, when the master, who must have seen it thousands of times, cannot find it?

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Chapter X: Sancho Enchants Dulcinea

Appearance and Reality

Chapter summary

Cide Hamete warns that he would prefer to pass over this chapter in silence, for fear of not being believed, because Don Quixote's follies here reach the end of the greatest that can be imagined and go two crossbow shots beyond them; but he wrote it as it was, adding or subtracting not an atom, because "truth thins but does not break, and always floats above lies as oil above water." Don Quixote, lying in ambush in the forest near El Toboso, sends Sancho Panza to town with the charge of speaking to Dulcinea del Toboso on his behalf and asking her to let herself be seen by the captive knight and give him her blessing. He gives him the instructions of a lover-observer: to note whether she changes color on hearing his name, whether she grows uneasy, whether she repeats the reply two or three times, whether she raises her hand to her hair, because the outward movements of lovers are "most certain messengers" of what goes on within. Sancho reassures him with proverbs and sets out.

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Reading of the Part

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