Why cervantes wrote don quixote

But as Cervantes launches his idealistic and possessed hero on a career open to public contempt, the possibilities of a many-leveled, kaleidoscopic theme must have become apparent very early. Previous Miguel de Cervantes Biography. Next Technique and Style in Don Quixote. Removing book from your Reading List will also remove any bookmarked pages associated with this title. Is Don Quixote worth reading? Don Quixote is the world's best book say the world's top authors. Don Quixote, the tale of a Spanish knight driven mad by reading too many chivalric romances, was yesterday voted the best book of all time in a survey of around of the world's best authors.

Who is Don Quixote's enemy? Sancho Panza. What do the windmills symbolize in Don Quixote? With their "long arms" and tall frames, they work as caricatures of giants. Another possible interpretation is that the windmills represent technology, the destruction of the past, and the loss of knightly values.

What mental illness did Don Quixote have? Apparently, Quixote also possesses a paranoid personality disorder, evidenced by his eccentric, odd behavior. He exhibits all of the classical signs-from his suspicions of others to his inability to take the blame for his actions.

What is Don Quixote's goal? Critical Essays Purpose of Don Quixote Cervantes himself states that he wrote Don Quixote in order to undermine the influence of those "vain and empty books of chivalry" as well as to provide some merry, original, and sometimes prudent material for his readers' entertainment.

Is Don Quixote a true story? Don Quixote. What is the name of Don Quixote's horse? Where is the sun shine? I had to teach myself to pay that little extra attention to the details of a person's life.

This book is not a traditional biography by any means. I'm telling the story of his life and I'm talking about his works, but the point of talking about his works is really not to illuminate the life. I'm turning to the life to help illuminate the answer to that question: How could he do something like this? I want to come back to that in a second because I wanted to ask you about your own human relationship with Cervantes and Quixote.

One of the interesting observations you make is that it's Cervantes'—for lack of a better word—empathy, his ability to see the world through other people's perspectives, that is one of the key elements of Quixote that makes it a different kind of storytelling.

What made that perspective, his ability to see the world through these other characters' perspectives, so radically different from other narratives during his time period? That's right. The case that I'm making is that fiction in the broadest sense, which is untrue stories that we know to be untrue, clearly was not invented in There were many, many, many before that and always have been.

We could speculate that the practice of telling untrue stories that others know are untrue in one form or another is coterminous with human coexistence in some way. That's not the point. The point is that we moderns, when we read fiction, we expect something else or something more from it. What we expect, and that's why we use modifiers like three-dimensional or believable, we want stories that engulf us in some way, that allow us to play this game that we play so fluently with fiction, which is both to know that it's not true and yet to treat it for a time as if it were true—the willing suspension of disbelief.

This was not a common reading practice. You can argue that it really wasn't an available option in the middle ages or in the classical period. There were different relationships to text. One could also argue there were relationships that we don't have anymore, ritualistic relationships to text.

Text could perform magic on their readers that, probably in the modern industrialized west, they are no longer capable of performing. What was developing during the period of the 16th and into the 17th century was this ability for readers or viewers of a spectacle to divide themselves in this way, to be both critically aware of what's going on and to shut off that critical awareness at the same time and to take a portion of one's empathetic ability and place it onto or along with another character, which created a very rich space for interacting on an imaginary level.

That's what I argue is really happening for the first combined and all-purpose way in Cervantes' work. He even makes attempts at it earlier in his life. It really comes together for him when he publishes Don Quixote in , which we know has bits and pieces of text that he's been working on probably for some 20 years. Prior forms of writing, even novels from the middle of the 16th century, from the picaresque to pastoral romances, had all sorts of aspects that Cervantes ends up throwing into Don Quixote.

What they didn't have was this playing on the horizons of what one can know, one being a character, and that allows Cervantes to have this extraordinary, fluid ability to move the reader outside of one character's perspective and into another character's perspective—including that person's blindness, including that person's lack of power—and to occupy that place and feel all of the incumbent desires and wishes that come along with that.

That, to me, was the introduction of this literary empathy into the novel form. OK, why this man and this time period? I ask because, one takeaway from your book is that Cervantes read and wrote a great deal, so he was a learned man, but it was his life experiences that gave him access to a different kind of knowledge.

There was book truth, and then there was his life experiences that added a deeper resonance of truth to that. Throughout your book you note that Cervantes had a pretty hard life—wars; battles; imprisonment; all these really, really horrible things—and yet when he finally starts writing later in life, he's laughing. He has a comic awareness of the human condition. To what can you attribute this guy, living in this time period, given this really difficult life, being able to bring this sense of empathy and comedy to his writing?

There's no question that we lucked out in a way—he was exactly the right man at exactly the right moment in history, he was put into exactly the right situations, many of them life-threatening, and thank god we didn't lose him at any point of the many points that we could have along that way, to finally become a late middle-aged man who sat down and started writing what he wrote. A person a generation prior to what Cervantes had been born into, the world that his father had been born in, would have been itinerant to a certain degree, but nothing like what Cervantes was allowed from the s to the s.

He was permitted by history to become the worldly, traveled man that he became, and certainly under very, very difficult circumstances. He didn't choose to leave Madrid at He got himself into a mess with the law for wounding another man when it was clearly illegal to be dueling, and he had to make a run for it. And that run happened at precisely that moment when the Spanish empire was expanding outside of its geographical boundaries in Spain, when the Mediterranean was opening up as a theater of warfare.

This allowed Cervantes, who a few years earlier probably would have just gone somewhere else in Spain to hide, to be out in the theater of the world.