Don Quixote

The First Novel and the Last

Published in two parts in 1605 and 1615, Don Quixote is simultaneously the first modern novel and a book that has never been surpassed in the range of what it attempts. Cervantes, writing in a Spain that was beginning its long imperial decline, invented a new literary form by satirising an older one: the chivalric romance. His satirical gesture — an aging Spanish hidalgo so addicted to novels of chivalry that he loses his mind and decides to become a knight-errant — opened up a space that four centuries of novelists have inhabited.

Alonso Quijano, who renames himself Don Quixote of La Mancha, is simultaneously ridiculous and heroic. He tilts at windmills believing them giants. He terrorises travellers he believes to be villains. He pursues a peasant girl he has imagined into a noblewoman named Dulcinea del Toboso. He suffers beatings, humiliations, and every kind of physical disaster. And he endures it all with a dignity that is genuinely magnificent, because within the fiction he inhabits, his actions are entirely coherent and genuinely noble.

Sancho Panza: The Perfect Counter-Weight

Don Quixote’s squire Sancho Panza is the novel’s other great creation: a fat, practical, thoroughly earthbound peasant who attaches himself to his master for promised rewards and gradually — against his better judgement, against all evidence — becomes infected with something like his master’s vision. Sancho believes and doesn’t believe simultaneously, and this double consciousness makes him the most modern character in a four-century-old book.

The Quixote-Sancho relationship is the template for every odd-couple pairing in literature, but also something more: a philosophical dialogue about the relationship between imagination and reality, conducted through slapstick. Sancho’s proverbs, his appetite, his peasant wisdom — these are not just comic counterpoint but Cervantes’s way of insisting that reality has its own claims on a life lived in fiction.

Part II: The Metafictional Masterpiece

The publication of a spurious Part II by a writer using the pseudonym Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda between Cervantes’s two volumes gave him the most extraordinary narrative opportunity: in the real Part II, characters have read Part I. They know who Don Quixote is. They stage situations for him. The knight moves through a world that has been shaped by his fictional existence in a way that anticipates postmodernism by three and a half centuries.

The Ending’s Desolation

When Don Quixote recovers his sanity on his deathbed — when Alonso Quijano returns from the knight’s adventure — the moment is devastating rather than redemptive. The recovery of reason is also the loss of everything that made his life significant.

Our rating: 4.5/5 — The founding text of the Western novel, and still one of its supreme achievements.

The First Modern Novel

Often called the first modern novel, Don Quixote is a foundational work of Western literature whose influence on everything that followed is hard to overstate. Cervantes tells the story of an ageing gentleman whose mind, addled by too many tales of chivalry, leads him to set out as a knight-errant, mistaking windmills for giants and inns for castles, accompanied by his earthy, loyal squire Sancho Panza. From this comic premise Cervantes built a sprawling, inventive, endlessly rich work that established narrative techniques — the play between illusion and reality, the self-aware fiction, the rounded character — that novelists have drawn on ever since.

Comedy and Pathos Together

The genius of the book is how it balances laughter and feeling. Don Quixote is genuinely funny, a catalogue of absurd misadventures, yet the deluded knight is also a figure of real pathos and even nobility — an idealist whose madness consists in believing the world should be better and more honourable than it is. Cervantes invites the reader to laugh at his hero and to love him at once, and the relationship between the dreaming Quixote and the practical Sancho becomes one of the great double acts in all of literature.

A Book About Books

Don Quixote is also, remarkably, a book about reading and storytelling itself. The hero’s madness springs from books, the novel is full of stories within stories, and in its second part the characters have read the first part and know they are famous — a dizzying self-awareness centuries ahead of its time. This playful interrogation of fiction, illusion, and the power of stories to shape how we see the world is part of why the novel feels so strikingly modern.

How to Read It

This is a long, episodic masterpiece, and modern readers are best served by a good contemporary translation that captures its humour and humanity without the archaism that can make it seem forbidding. It rewards patience and a willingness to enjoy its digressions, and it need not be read all at once. As one of the supreme achievements of world literature — funny, moving, profound, and inexhaustibly inventive — Don Quixote repays the reader who gives it time with one of the richest experiences fiction has to offer. Four centuries on, its hero remains instantly recognisable — the dreamer whose refusal to accept the world as it is is at once ridiculous and noble — and the novel’s influence runs through the whole tradition of fiction that followed, which is why it is so often called the book from which all later novels descend.

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