The book does not carry a single message, and the only purpose Cervantes declares is to topple the ill-founded machine of books of chivalry, as the prologue to Part One says; Cide Hamete repeats, in the last paragraph, that he wanted nothing but to make men weary of the made-up and absurd stories of those books. The rest are readings.
The reading the text most favors is the question of who decides what the scene is, and what it costs to disagree. The gentleman always has an explanation, an enemy enchanter; Sancho points out what is seen and what hurts; and in Part Two the others begin to fabricate what he expects to see.
Classic readings, according to Carpeaux, fall into two lines: one that reads the gentleman's defeat as the defeat of faith in a world without faith, running from Turgenev to Unamuno, and another that restores the rights of reality, bringing the book closer to the picaresque novel, running from Menéndez y Pelayo to Américo Castro. One reading of the book sees in the duel with the bachelor a clash of two worldviews, the medieval one, mystical and ambiguous, and the Renaissance one, rationalist.
Auerbach rejects both: read in the text, the scene of the enchanted Dulcinea is a joke, overpoweringly comic, and no one in the book is condemned, neither the gentleman nor those who mock him; to take that madness as a symbol or as a tragedy would be an act of violence against the text. The ending leaves loose threads: Alonso Quijano dies sane, and the epitaph says he died sane and lived mad.