Don Quixote: Metafiction, Identity, and Narrative in Cervantes

Introduction: Don Quixote as the First Modern Novel

Don Quixote is among the most influential novels ever written. It explores the shifting boundaries of truth and illusion through a narrator who self-consciously makes us constantly aware of his presence and who is preoccupied with literary criticism and theory. With his postmodernist tendencies, Cervantes has become a novelist's novelist par excellence.

Often called the first modern novel, Don Quixote was originally conceived as a comic satire against the chivalric romances. However, Cervantes did not destroy the chivalric ideal of the romances he rejected — he transfigured it. The work has been seen as a veiled attack on the Catholic Church, on contemporary Spanish politics, or as a symbol of the duality of the Spanish character.

Neither wholly tragedy nor wholly comedy, Don Quixote gives a panoramic view of seventeenth-century Spanish society. The central characters are the elderly, idealistic knight who sets out on his old horse Rosinante to seek adventure, and the materialistic squire Sancho Panza, who accompanies his master from one failure to another. Their relationship, though marked by fierce argument, is ultimately founded upon mutual respect. In their debates, they gradually take on some of each other's attributes.

During his travels, Don Quixote's overexcited imagination blinds him to reality: he mistakes windmills for giants, flocks of sheep for armies, and galley slaves for oppressed gentlemen. Sancho is named governor of the isle of Barataria — a mock title — and Don Quixote is bested in a duel with the Knight of the White Moon, who is in reality a student of his acquaintance in disguise. Don Quixote is passionately devoted to his own imaginative creation, the beautiful Dulcinea: "Oh Dulcinea de Tobosa, day of my night, glory of my suffering, true North and compass of every path I take, guiding star of my fate…" The hero returns to La Mancha, and only on his deathbed does Don Quixote confess the folly of his past adventures.

Narrative Structure and Metafictional Complexity

Howard Mancing has gathered convincing textual evidence, in his "Cide Hamete Benengeli vs. Miguel de Cervantes: The Metafictional Dialectic of Don Quijote" (Cervantes, I [1981], 63–81), to show how the Arabic historian becomes more significant in Part II as a character providing comic relief and as a foil to Don Quixote.

There is no doubt that Cervantes, in his overall narrative strategy, recognized the usefulness of pitting one narrator against another, with a translator in between. This dramatic multiplication of superimposed narrative voices, combined with the voices of other characters in dialogue, creates a "metafictional dialectic" that is richly confusing in its complex ambiguities. The implied reader delights in his own simultaneous role as both accomplice and victim of the author's illusionistic devices. (Jane P. Tompkins, ed., Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism [Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980].)

Cervantes follows the pattern of the picaresque chivalric romance, which depends on a succession of chance adventures. We are told nothing of Don Quixote's previous life before we meet him in the book; we therefore live his life more or less chronologically, from his fiftieth year until his death. The story seems to unfold with the desultory quality of life as it is being lived, with little apparent consideration of formal ordering and coherence in the structure of the novel.

In Part One, the omissions and inconsistencies in the details of the story suggest that Cervantes hardly revised what he wrote. There are references back to previous experiences but rarely any sign of forward planning. Don Quixote is an episodic novel, with many of its incidents susceptible to being reordered into a different sequence. The plots and characters seem to be gradually discovered by the author as the story progresses, though there is a slight modification of character as the novel moves through Part Two — knight and squire have an effect on each other, as Sancho Panza becomes less naive. The growing relationship between knight and squire provides one of the clearest threads of sequence in the novel.

The Problem of Authorial Identity

In view of such complexity, Mancing makes a serious mistake in trying to oversimplify the situation from the outset by asserting (p. 64) that the narrator at the beginning of the Prologue to Part I and "the author of the final, edited text" are both identical with "the person referred to on the title page where it says compuesto por Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra" and "the first-person editor who appears occasionally in Part I." This problem is not so easily solved. Mancing returns to it on the following page (note 5) with these words:

"It is the nature of the first-person fictional narrator to reveal his identity. When the narrator is not a character in the work or an identified fictional editor he is assumed to be the person whose name is on the book's cover. This does not, of course, mean that it is a literal truth that Cervantes had a friend with whom he carried on the conversation recorded in the prologue. The Cervantes who edits and narrates Don Quixote may be fictionalized, but he most certainly is Cervantes."

According to this, since the "editor," who "may be fictionalized," did not identify himself by any other name, "he most certainly is Cervantes." It seems, however, that the literary analyst gains nothing by applying the same name "Cervantes" both to the man of flesh and blood born in 1547 and to the traditional narrative voice, or "yo," which speaks to the reader in a phrase such as "de cuyo hombre no quiere acordarse."

One might even say that it is a natural impossibility for "the first-person fictional narrator to reveal his identity" in any full sense. For purely practical reasons, as we analyze Don Quixote it behooves us to distinguish as clearly as possible between author or writer, editor or primary narrator, translator, and Arabic historian — just as we distinguish between author, Don Quixote, and Sancho Panza, or between the character Don Quixote and the written text Don Quixote.

Not that the author himself always helps us to draw clear distinctions. To write is to pose the problem of personal identity; even in a private letter or diary, the writer's voice often seems to speak from another self. (Inés Azar, "Meaning, Intention and the Written Text: Anthony Close's Approach to Don Quixote and its Critics," MLN, 96 [1981], 440–44; and Mary Louise Pratt, "The Ideology of Speech-Act Theory," Centrum, new series, I [1981], 5–18.)

Margit Frenk has shown how the "yo" of the prologue to the Lazarillo begins as the voice of the anonymous author and ends by transforming itself into the voice of the narrator Lázaro, whom the reader can often distinguish from the protagonist Lazarillo. Cervantes used in Don Quixote fundamental novelistic devices of this sort, some of which he had probably learned from reading the Lazarillo. ("Lazarillo de Tormes. Autor-Narrador-Personaje," in Romanica Europaen et Americana: Festschrift für Harri Meier [Bonn: Bouvier, 1980], ed. Hans Dieter Bork et al., pp. 185–92.)

Nowhere is this lesson more evident than in Cervantes's prefatory pages, prologues, and epilogues. One might expect the author not to fictionalize himself in his dedications, at least; but the dedication of Part I to the Duke of Béjar is largely plagiarized from Fernando de Herrera, and in the dedication of Part II to the Count of Lemos a fictionalized Cervantes engages in dialogue with a fictitious envoy from China.

At the beginning of the Prologue to Part I, a fictionalized Cervantes encourages the implied reader to confuse Don Quijote the character with Don Quixote the written text. The written and typographic conventions available to Cervantes and his printer did not permit or require the clear distinction that modern conventions impose upon twenty-first-century writers and readers.

In the epilogue to Part II, when Cide Hamete addresses his pen, the reader cannot be sure at exactly what point the voice of the pen yields again to that of Cide Hamete, or perhaps even to that of the primary narrator. (John J. Allen, Don Quixote: Hero or Fool? Part Two [Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1979], p. 24.)

The question of identity, literary or otherwise, is not a peripheral one in Don Quixote. The alienation of the protagonist — a reader who has merged his own identity with that of the knights whose adventures he has read about — is central to the novel itself. When Don Quixote uses the phrase (I, 5) "yo sé quién soy," not to assert the conventional aristocratic identity that guarantees the word of a man of honor, but to fragment his own identity ("y sé que puedo ser no sólo los que he dicho, sino todos los doce Pares de Francia, y aun todos los nueve de la Fama…"), we can hear behind the scenes the voice of the author Cervantes, suggesting through the rhetoric of fiction the problematic nature of human identity — especially the identity of a reader caught up by the written words of a work of fiction.

Conclusion: Chivalry's Demise and the Human Condition

Don Quixote is among the greatest works in all of literature — not only for its narrative elements, such as the multiplicity of narrators and its rich cast of characters, but also for what Cervantes intended to say about the human condition. He not only satirized the novels of his time but made profound observations about human nature and happiness. Don Quixote was not a pitiable madman leading a horrible life; he was happy in his fantastic world, more so, perhaps, than anyone governed purely by reason. After all, his most famous declaration is: "Sé quién soy y lo que puedo llegar a ser" — I know who I am and what I may become.

In the end, the beaten and battered Don Quixote renounces all the chivalric truths he followed so fervently and dies from a fever. With his death, knights-errant become extinct. Benengeli returns at the close of the novel to tell us that illustrating the demise of chivalry was his main purpose in writing the history of Don Quixote. Yet what survives is not merely a satire but a meditation on imagination, identity, and the irreducible human need to invest the world with meaning — a meditation that has lost none of its power across more than four centuries of readers.