A Critical Paper for the course Reading and Writing. Don Quixote A Model for the Modern Novel.pdf

27-Feb-17
JR Miyage E. Aquino
Don Quixote:
A Model for the Modern Novel
Don Quixote
Centro Escolar University
in cooperation with
Centro Escolar Integrated School-Makati
Reading and Writing
A Critical Paper
for the course
chivalric romance, Don Quixote, literature, model, modern, novel.
Keywords:
Date of Submission
STEM 1E
Abstract
Don Quixote is a Spanish novel by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. Don Quixote is widely
considered by literary critics and readers alike as the classic model for the world's first modern
novel to be ever produced, serving as one of the foundations of modern literature, also serving
as the model of Western and Spanish literature and how Don Quixote stands in a unique
position between chivalric romance and the modern novel.

DON QUIXOTE: A MODEL FOR THE MODERN NOVEL PAGE 1 of 11
Someone needs a hero to ―right‖ the wrongs in the world, what you call a superhero but
then comes a person named Don Quixote. Miguel de Cervantes‘ Don Quixote has been as
dominant over eras as it is engaging. It is considered to be an important truism for Cervantes'
Don Quixote to be the world's first present day novel. Considered to be the foundation of modern
western literature, Don Quixote is also stated to be the first modern novel itself. The story of Don
Quixote is all about Alonso Quixana, who lives in La Mancha, in the Spanish farmland. Alonso
read a substantial number of books about chivalry and in this way; Alonso has lost his psyche,
meandering the country as a knight-errant named Don Quixote de La Mancha. With Miguel de
Cervantes Saavedra‘ criticizing the quality of all the chivalric romances that were produced at
that time, Cervantes‘ was a pioneer in inserting satirical humor in the novel Don Quixote.
Cervantes was bold enough to introduce new techniques and a perspective that was
nonexistent back then, thus supporting the claims of Don Quixote being the first modern novel.
Being the principal entry in the modern novel genre, Don Quixote is likewise generally referred
to as the apex of Spanish Literary composition. Being considered new to the readers, the novel is
very relevant in that Don Quixote represents the highest aspirations that human beings have.
Reading a great novel written about four hundred years ago but the challenges of understanding
one‘s own identity are very much pertinent today and are also viable for the modern times. The
character Don Quixote has moments of failure, yet at the same time readers laughs a lot and
enjoys the ride because the protagonist is so well depicted. Readers appreciate everything Don
Quixote stands for. A modern novel about renovating society, to help society, to redeem the
poor, to help the oppressed.
The paper will argue that Don Quixote is the first classic model of the modern novel,
which includes satire and the humorous situations which are mostly burlesque, making the
elements of this work new to a literary genre.
―At first, I was incredulous about this – how could one text be the ‗founding‘
text? – but the more I read and the more I think about it, the more I recognize the
novel‘s extraordinary qualities: its stylistic plurality and breadth of social
ventriloquism, the scope of its technical ambition and its irrepressibility. It
Don Quixote:
A Model for the Modern Novel
Don Quixote

contains so many of the qualities and quirks of later works (even unto
contemporary fiction). It‘s all there: the author as fiction; combined with an
unreliable and intrusive narrator (or two); and split screen action; with
cliffhangers and reveals; even the novel within a novel. So much so that it begins
to remind me of a designer‘s sample book – a kind working manual from which
later novelists have picked and chosen techniques/scenes/events to make up
innumerable new novels.‖
(Victoria, 2007)
At the point when Don Quixote was initially created as a clear and well defined
explication, it laid an emphasis on run-of-the-mill personalities and their circumstance in which
has for the most part held on right up until the present time. Don Quixote was compelling all
through European writing in a move towards accounts of sensible interpretation. Don Quixote is
the first modern novel and also the first to delve deeper the profound subjectivity the
protagonist's have, and how they change their bonds with the challenges they had together. If the
romances that Don Quixote parodies and the satire that the book embraces and transcends both
feature stock, one-dimensional characters, in Quixote, Cervantes invents something remarkable
much akin to a new language or fiction. Don Quixote was immensely dominant in literature in
this move towards the practical and its stories that are immensely filled with exposition. Don
Quixote is stated to be the first modern novel since it is the first to investigate a character's inner
subjectivity and the way the protagonist's change through their bond with each other.
Gaffney (2009) states that, ―Don Quixote himself is no more than the product of the very
processes he observes, a congeries of words set up in type, run off as proof, corrected and rerun,
bound in pages, and sold at so many reales a copy‖. If the romances that Don Quixote parodies
and the satire that the book embraces both feature superficial characters which proves that
Cervantes invented something remarkable, more like a new language of fiction. The characters
entice the readers to see the world in another perspective, creating bonds and living an ostensible
life. In other words, Cervantes shifts from external character descriptions to actually letting us
experience the world through the perspective of the characters.

Not only does Cervantes revealed to us the points of view of the different characters from
the vantage point of their superficial lives, he also shows how different characters can differently
experience the same situation. Fuentes (2003) states that ―But I believe that ''Don Quixote'' really
inaugurates what we understand modern fiction to be -- a reflection of our presence in the world
as problematic beings in an unending history, whose continuity depends on subjecting reality to
the imagination‖. Cervantes introduced something new in the way the protagonists engage
without imperatively surmising in the parts they are in. That change between how a character is
seen by the world and what is going on inside his or her mind, is essential to a character's ability
to spring to life. Quixote speaks about the premature but well desired endeavor to make full
grown characters utilizing creative composition with regards to an envisioned circumstance.
Don Quixote claims to be the first modern novel because of the strain of realism
throughout the novel which continually debunks the protagonist's fantasies and exaggerated love
for adventure. In the first part of the book, Don Quixote de la Mancha does not see the world for
what it is and prefers to imagine that he is a chivalrous knight. The realism applies more to the
style in which the details are relayed than the actual narrative content. The existence of a man
that is named Don Quixote appears to be very far-fetched. The story is realistic, but the character
is unrealistic.
The illusion comes crashing down. Books are no longer the grand, imaginative
truth that moved Don Quixote through perils without end. So the windmills were
not giants. So the armies were only flocks of sheep. So reality is shabby, gray,
unarmed. . . . What can Don Quixote do but return home, get into bed, recover his
reason and peacefully die? The ''impossible dream'' is over. No wonder that
Dostoyevsky, in his diary, calls ''Don Quixote'' ''the saddest book ever written.''
For it is, he adds, ''the story of disillusionment.''
(Fuentes, 2003)
Woodward (2005) states that ―Still, through all these troubles (or perhaps as a result of
them), the errant knight slowly emerges from his fog of delusion. He and his squire remark on
the world in truly extraordinary ways, and at book‘s end have changed‖. Don Quixote's
obsession with chivalric romances changed him to be an insane man in the world, thinking that
he is a knight, becomes more than its intentional humor, it has transformed reality to change its

attraction on the everyday person. Don Quixote became insane in the first paragraphs of the
novel. He has indulged himself in chivalric romances, barely noticing his lack of sleep and
excessive reading. All of the books that he has read took control over his mind. According to
Gaffney (2009), ―He names his horse Rocinante, names a peasant girl his Dulcinea, made armor
and he had set out on his made up adventure‖.
―But then, the terrifyingly destructive, not evil but just plain and cruelly
destructive, dukes invite the knight and his squire to their castle. And here the
sadness of the book is brought to our hearts. For in the castle, Quixote's dreams
are offered to him in reality. Where his wonderful imagination could turn an inn
into a palace, here the palace is real. Where he could imagine scullery maids as
highborn princesses, here the aristocratic women are real. Both real and cruel.
Don Quixote is subjected to incessant mockery. Even Sancho, the levelheaded
peasant, is lured into the political comedy of becoming governor of a nonexistent
island.‖
(Fuentes, 2003)
The egotism of the Duke and the Duchess in the second part highlights how inadmissible
Cervantes observed these class qualifications to be. The predominance of Sancho and Teresa
Panza's insight toward the end of the novel is a triumph for antiquated goodness and intelligence
despite a world that makes individuals useful yet trivial. At long last, Cervantes, who was
quickly banished from the Catholic church in 1587, talks about the congregation in the novel
also. Sancho's self-distinguishing proof as a believer in Jesus Christ, specifically, illuminates the
new profound quality he speaks to.
Don Quixote is considered as the first modern novel because it collects, eclipses and
transforms pre-existing literary genres taking fixed topos and forms - the pastoral and the
picaresque - and creating something relatively anarchaic and endlessly making potential out of
them. Cervantes uses literary technique such as realism, intertextuality, and metatheatre
throughout the novel. Cervantes implies that Don Quixote is a real character and that the events
in the story truly occurred to give it the appearance of credibility. The characters tell tales that

incorporate events from the real world. Their encounters are magnified by Don Quixote's
imagination into chivalrous quests.
''Don Quixote has so many levels of significance that I can set foot on only a
couple of them. The first is the dialogue of genres. Cervantes inaugurates the
modern novel through the impurity, the mestizaje of all known genres. Often
criticized for ignoring the requirements of the well-made novel (recognizable
characters, expert plotting, linear narrative), Cervantes audaciously brings into his
book, first and foremost, the dialogue between the epic (Don Quixote) and the
picaresque (Sancho Panza). But then he introduces the tale within the tale, the
Moorish, the pastoral, the Byzantine modes and, of course, the love story. The
modern novel is born as both an encounter of genres and a refusal of purity‖.
(Fuentes, 2003)
With the novel‘s predominant blend of a modern reading with a conventional tone, no
wonder that readers across multiple generations enjoyed it. It has been counted among the
masterpieces of world literature for over two hundred years, stressing the reasons for its
greatness, and the sorts of information one needs to experience a full reading of the text. Modern
readers accept that Don Quixote is a novel. Undoubtedly, it has regularly been known as the first
and best of all novels. Cervantes could not have set out to stay in contact with one, nor did
seventeenth century readers approach Don Quixote with the craving of comprehending one.
Cervantes' content even reveals to us why he needed it. As to Cervantes, such books were
offensive since they exhibited fiction under the pretense of recorded truth. Books of gallantry
were still well known in Cervantes' day, the contention being on the premise of verifiable proof,
and on the record that Cervantes' resistance to them was genuine. Gaylord (2008) states that ―I
propose here that the founding work of a genre (the modern novel) that has been shown to share
many of its features with history finds its distinctive features not only in pseudo-historical play
with historiographic conventions, but in serious history—history meant to inform and enlighten,
to press national and personal agendas—and very particularly in the New World accounts
Cervantes could have known.‖

Cervantes accomplished the objective in banishing these anecdotal and erroneously
authentic works by making a ridiculous chivalric sentiment. Gaylord (2008) states that
―Although the idea that language might play a central role in chivalric romance is, or has
become, counterintuitive, a brief look into the knight‘s favorite romance can help us to recover
the chivalric script that Don Quixote and his author know by heart‖. This would be appropriately
comprehended by readers whose nonexclusive desires had been shaped by a recognition with
existing chivalric sentiments of the time. Don Quixote itself was generally seen by Cervantes'
peers as exactly what Cervantes accepted and needed it to be, an interesting novel, through its
characters and occasions in Don Quixote which frustrate these desires, frequently fulfilling them
in the most shocking ways. It was not just taken to be and could be instructed as an interesting
book, yet that it really was one. Literary critics state that the cleverness of the book is
undermined. Cervantes discovered it distressingly troublesome, and at last unimaginable, to
recognize appearance and reality, and in this manner to distinguish what may even constitute
truth in writing. Fiction, which is by definition untruthful, was not just favored, it was
profoundly agreeable to Cervantes himself.
―While the overarching plot structure of the novel is easy to recount, there are
things that make it an intimidating read. It‘s a translation from the Spanish, its
narrative stretches over some 20 years and covers 600 real miles, and it‘s full of
archaic cultural allusions and a myriad of literary styles (among them tragedy,
comedy, prose romance, poetry, political writing, and drama). In the end, readers
share certain troubles with the errant knight: They suffer great confusion on the
road to enlightenment.‖
(Woodward, 2005)
Thus of these troubles and obscurity, Don Quixote went up against exceptional quality
and breadth with the end goal that ensuing eras of readers have been perpetually bewildered by
its confusing nature, similarly as they keep on being baffled by the incomprehensible way of life
itself. It could be said, the brain of Cervantes got to be distinctly woven into the texture of his
work, and therefore, the tolerating enthusiasm for Don Quixote is truly in view of contemplations
that rise above the bland desires for which Cervantes and his peers comprehended it. Since

Cervantes' psyche was so lavishly outfitted, present day readers have the chance to increase
significantly more than he ever proposed to give them.
This opens a door for a richly experienced reading as Don Quixote does not vindicate
twentieth-century readers from the need to think about the mind boggling connections that
connects Cervantes' admitted expectations, the current collection of chivalric writing, and the
artful culmination he formed from his readings and his experience of life. Just as the persuasive
interaction between our insight into such matters and our familiarity with the content counting
the tremendous assemblage of critique and basic knowledge that has hence appended itself, It
would be best if we would be able to start to see the extent of Cervantes‘ achievement. Gaylord
(2008) states that ―Because Cervantes‘ protagonist does many more things with words than his
avowed chivalric model, his discursive curriculum can thus be used, like a prism, to display the
multiple color-bands of the author‘s parodic practice, permitting us to see which of the knight‘s
linguistic behaviors are modeled on chivalric romance and which are likely to have been
suggested by other genres or by discursive modes beyond the province of literature‖. By
empowering us to perceive Cervantes' objectives inside the setting of non specific desires in light
of chivalric sentiments, The thoughts of Cervantes‘ improves our experience of this incredible
work and contributes essentially to our comprehension of why it is so awesome. With an
itemized learning of the chivalric custom, a literary researcher's analytical like inventiveness, and
an astounding affectability toward subtleties of the current genre of literature.
In the introduction to part I of Don Quixote, we are informed that the novel is a
denunciation against the chivalric sentiments of the time. Part I closes with a long dialog of the
books of valor, spread more than a few sections. Part II starts with a dialog of chivalric writing,
Cide Hamete telling us in the finishing sentences of the work that it was not his desire to put the
loathing of men through the feigned and absurd stories of the chivalric sentiments at that time.
Gaffney (2009) states that ―Cervantes is poking fun at the false Book II of Don Quixote, but in
this stylistic choice, he is elevating his characters‘ position in a real world because he
understands that there is an ultimately serious tension between the recognition of fictions as
fictions and the acceptance of them as reality, however easy it may seem to maintain these two
awareness‘s simultaneously.‖

As we had learned in Don Quixote, the books pertaining to chivalric romances are the
basis of the protagonist's knowledge about knight-errantry, and as the reader can see at the start
of the novel, it is Don Quixote's desire to be a knight-errant. His relationship with the books, so
far as valor is concerned, is added up to. It is hence proper for us to talk about our investigation
of Don Quixote by looking at Cervantes' association with this classification. The proof is
overpowering that he knew them exceptionally very much for sure, that he had, similar to the
norm, read in any event some portion of most of the printed content.
Don Quixote is a fictional novel that dances on the line between fantasy and
reality. Books can often take readers into new worlds, but the land of La Mancha
beckons for a complete relinquishing of the senses of reality. Cervantes created a
romantic fool who captures both hearts and minds with his chivalric pursuit of
knight errantry. Don Quixote represents someone who creates his own brand of
reality and gives himself over to it completely, while taking others along for the
ride. Fiction is only fiction because it is not believed to be true, but once fantasy
becomes the truth, it can evolved into a more desired reality
(Gaffney, 2009)
At the time of the creation of Don Quixote, Cervantes thought that chivalric romances
were very lacking. There are an excessive number of unmistakable criticisms and suggested
reactions of the works in Don Quixote, reactions which are steady and good with each other, to
take into account some other conclusion. The books could be great yet they are not. On this point
the storytellers and the novel's most reasonable characters all concur.
Much more vital, in any case, has been the advancement of writing since 1600. As
chivalric romances died down and vanished since the eighteenth century, nobody reads any of
them without reading Cervantes' Don Quixote. Each contemporary reader thinks about Don
Quixote with a point of view that is not the same as that of Cervantes and his peers.
Readers have discovered different values in the content, which it obviously has.
Contemporary reading then has been anticipated in reverse, onto the creator. Gaylord (2008)
states that ―The two strategies we have been examining—ironic attention to the protagonist‘s
ambition to do heroic things with words, and concentration in a single character of the

providential authorial functions of chivalric romance—work largely to configure Don Quixote as
a failed chivalric speaker‖. If Don Quixote is not totally portrayed as boggling against chivalric
romances, a position which most present day readers agree, and the creator along these lines did
not made it to be such. Chivalric sentiments were not written with quality, a conclusion drawn
from the remarks on them in Don Quixote that Cervantes would not have utilized his gifts to
assault them. Such would have been a paltry objective, unworthy of an incredible creator. The
chivalric books did vanish after Don Quixote. Accordingly they were at that point dying, and
Cervantes would not have been beating what is at the time alluded to as a dead.
This notion gets from a deficient evaluation of the significance of chivalric sentiments in
sixteenth-century Spain. Gaylord (2008) states that ―His interest in history bears the same
essentialist stamp that marks his obsession with chivalry: he reads not for information, but for
meaning; and he improvises narrative with a view to monumentalizing his own exemplarity and
to securing his place as señor de la historia‖. These books were the most loved and delighted
form of escape, reading, of an age with substantially more constrained possibilities for
preoccupation than today. They not just reflected qualities, they formed them, and except for
formal education, there is no piece of sixteenth-century Spanish culture to which they are not
important. The chivalric books told individuals, especially men, that it was more pleasant and
masculine to thrash adversaries by arms than by words.
In the previous paragraphs, Cervantes had and needed his readers to have too a burlesque
chivalric sentiment, which through illustration and discourse uncovered the deficiencies of the
past works of that class, and gave readers data and direction with which to enhance themselves.
Gaylord (2008) states that ―Although much of the would-be knight‘s activity is inspired by the
books he has sold his ancestral lands to buy, he is never again—after the opening chapter‘s
decisive scene of reading—seen to consult an actual book of chivalry‖. From Don Quixote,
Cervantes trusted they would pick better books and read books all the more fundamentally, as
consequence of which they would live more righteous lives and turn out to be more enthusiastic.
The paper will clarify and facilitate on why Cervantes' own particular perspective of his book is
today of unassuming significance and why, if the book is a work of art, this is fundamentally so.
Woodward (2005) states that ―Don Quixote was the first modern novel and so gave birth
to the genre that has dominated Western literature since the eighteenth century, it is the first

novel whose characters grow, develop, and influence each other. It was a highly self-conscious,
experimental work; one of its major themes is how literature affects its readers and,
consequently, the writer‘s ethical responsibility‖. Regardless, Don Quixote's admiration is quite
recently unimportant related to the respectability deliberately put in it by Cervantes. The
conviction that a creator may and ought to incorporate good truths has vanished from standard
Western writing. Morals, reasoning, and religion have turned out to be isolated from it. The
creator of various literary novels may endeavor to show us, however it may no longer reveal to
us how to experience the richness of our lives.
When all is said and done, the abstract issues Cervantes considers in Don Quixote still
exist. Despite the fact that individuals deny it, literary works, including fiction, impact their
conduct, and this spots duty on both readers and writers. One should in any case recognize truth
and lies in composing which is distributed as verifiable. Be that as it may, the structures these
inquiries take in Don Quixote are age-old, and darken to the general reader.
The purpose behind the book's enthusiasm to modern readers is without a doubt
Cervantes' authority of the Spanish dialect, which makes Don Quixote a standout amongst the
modern novels ever composed. The extensive and beautiful vocabulary, the similarly brilliant
linguistic structures, the distinctive and differentiating levels of dialect found in the book, the
verbal play and amusingness, do much to make his work a nonstop joy, and to include us in the
protagonist' issues.
In conclusion, literary critics have declared that Don Quixote is the very first true
example of the modern novel with critics identifying the arcs of change bracing the story‘s titular
character and his friend Sancho Panza as the essential marker that recognizes it as the first of its
breed, and proposing that the subtlety in the exchange and portrayal is primary in isolating Don
Quixote from all preceding texts. Having all said that, the author therefore parts the reader with
this proverb, that ―the proof is in the pudding‖. As Don Quixote told it, ―Thou hast seen nothing
yet‖.

Works Cited:
Gaffney, M. B. (fall 2009). Don Quixote. Bridging Reality and Fiction. Theocrit: The Online
Journal of Undergraduate Literary Theory and Criticsm, 2(1), 9-15. Retrieved February
14, 2017, from http://theocrit.sfasu.edu/docs/fall2009/Gaffney%20Revised.pdf
Gaylord, M. M. (2008). Don Quixote's New World of Language. Retrieved February 14, 2017,
from https://www.h-net.org/~cervant/csa/artics07/gaylords07.pdf
Fuentes, C. (2003, November 2). Don Quixote. Retrieved February 14, 2017, from
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/02/books/tilt.html
Woodward, J. (2005, March 1). Don Quixote at 400. Retrieved February 14, 2017, from
http://www.pw.org/content/don_quixote_400
V. (2007, July 30). Don Quixote and the Invention of the Modern Novel. Retrieved February 14,
2017, from https://tiltingatwindmillsblog.wordpress.com/2007/07/30/don-quixote-and-
the-invention-of-the-modern-novel/

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