This essay examines the nature of Don Quixote's madness in Cervantes's novel, questioning the widely accepted claim that reading too many chivalric romances drove the protagonist insane. Drawing on key episodes from Parts I and II — including Quixote's treatment of the beaten peasant boy, his declarations about Dulcinea, and his final defeat at the hands of Sampson Carrasco — the paper argues that Quixote's paranoid delusions likely preceded his obsessive reading, and that the books merely gave structure and content to a madness already taking hold. The essay also considers the historical context of the Inquisition and book-burnings as a reason Cervantes may have framed the novel as a cautionary tale about literature's dangers.
In the opening of his novel Don Quixote, Cervantes claims that Don Quixote goes mad after reading too many books about the heroic deeds of knights-errant. However, like the old argument about whether the chicken or the egg came first, it could be argued that Quixote was already going mad and simply latched onto these books, incorporating them into his delusion. If this is the case, the problem lay within Quixote himself, and had he not built a grand delusion around stories of knights, he would have developed some other paranoid fantasy to act out.
As Cervantes writes in the first chapter, "… whenever [Quixote] was at leisure … [he] gave himself up to reading books of chivalry with such ardour and avidity that he almost entirely neglected the … management of his property; and to such a pitch did his eagerness and infatuation go that he sold many an acre of tillageland to buy books of chivalry to read, and brought home as many of them as he could get." (Part I, Chapter 1)
The story at first glance seems charming. Don Quixote decides that he must ride off to avenge wrongdoing and to exalt the Lady Dulcinea. The story has been retold in various forms, including the musical Man of La Mancha, which portrays Don Quixote as a deluded but gentle and well-meaning old man whose dreams improve the lives of those around him. The actual story, however, is not quite so simple.
His delusions do seem harmless to anyone but himself at first. He decides that a poor, dirty peasant woman is actually a fine lady of noble breeding, and that all the heroic deeds he performs will be done in her honor. By Chapter 4, however, we see that Quixote's meddlesome delusions are not always helpful. He comes upon a young boy being mercilessly beaten by his master. The boy claims his master owes him wages; the master insists the boy is dishonest. Don Quixote arbitrarily decides the boy is telling the truth and demands that the man stop beating him and pay what is owed. The man, realizing Quixote will leave if humored, promises to comply — and, as soon as Quixote departs, resumes beating the boy.
This incident is characteristic of many of Quixote's adventures throughout the book: he perceives events one way while everyone else sees them quite differently. Sometimes only Quixote himself is harmed by these delusions, but at other times his squire Sancho is badly beaten, and in one incident Quixote's horse is seriously hurt. In fact, Don Quixote moves through the world demanding to be treated as a remarkably special person and picking fights wherever he goes. If the books he had read caused this behavior, they did him great harm. If, on the other hand, Don Quixote had behaved as he is sometimes portrayed — a simple man sincerely trying to improve the world — then the books would have done him good.
Since tales of chivalry were enormously popular at the time yet very few men imagined themselves to actually be knights, it seems more likely that as Don Quixote slipped into paranoia, he structured his system of false beliefs around the books he happened to be reading. This is not so different from people in the 1950s who became convinced that Martians were trying to contact them through the fillings in their teeth. Scientists were speculating about whether intelligent life might exist on Mars, and people with a tenuous grip on reality latched onto that idea, decided it was true, and concluded they were so special that Martians were attempting to communicate with them personally.
The longer Don Quixote acts out his fantasy, the more real it becomes to him. His armor is fashioned from discarded rubbish, yet to him it is genuine. His horse is old and tired, but to Don Quixote it is a beautiful, powerful steed that is, in its own way, as heroic as its master. By Chapter 25 of the first book, Quixote's delusions are firmly in place, and nothing seems capable of dissuading him.
In rich irony, Don Quixote decides he is obligated to perform acts of madness because his beloved Dulcinea has been unfaithful. Sancho tries to reason with him, pointing out that Quixote could not possibly know this to be true. Quixote responds that what he imagines is more important than what may actually have happened. When Sancho discovers that Dulcinea is merely a peasant woman and not of royal birth, Quixote informs him that since he — Quixote — has decided she is a princess, she is one. He articulates the firmness of his convictions: "I thank thee for thy good intentions, friend Sancho … but I would have thee know that all these things I am doing are not in joke, but very much in earnest, for anything else would be a transgression of the ordinances of chivalry, which forbid us to tell any lie whatever under the penalties due to apostasy…" (Part I, Chapter 25).
"Carrasco's disguise plan backfires initially"
"Quixote loses, returns home, and dies"
It makes sense that Cervantes would use the notion that books drove Quixote mad; this was the era of the Inquisition, and book-burnings were common. Framing the novel as a cautionary tale about dangerous reading provided useful cover. Yet Don Quixote invented fantastical explanations for nearly everything he encountered — ordinary inns, ordinary women, ordinary windmills. The evidence throughout the novel suggests that Quixote's madness came first, and that his beloved books of chivalry simply gave that madness its particular shape and language.
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