After ReadingNo other work affects me quite like Don Quixote. Every time I revisit it, I inevitably lose my composure.
Cervantes died on April 23, 1616—coincidentally, the same day as Shakespeare—which is why we now have World Book Day.
The first part of Don Quixote was published in 1605, the second part a decade later in 1615. Despite being over 400 years old, it’s widely recognized as the first modern novel.
In this book, Cervantes created the “eternal Don Quixote,” a literary figure that transcends time. While Don Quixote himself is eternal, his companion Sancho Panza feels perpetually alive and relatable. As you read, this practical farmer often feels like someone you know—a relative, perhaps, or even yourself.
What kind of person is Sancho? Consider the contrast:
Don Quixote: dignified, wise yet mad, romantic, fearlessly noble, determined to save the world.
Sancho Panza: playful, foolish yet clear-headed, practical, cowardly and cunning, wanting nothing more than a simple family life.
Their conversations are wonderfully absurd, born from their stark differences. As one critic noted, “The dialogue between master and servant is marvelously amusing and thought-provoking.”
Conflict is essential to great literature, and it’s brilliantly embodied in these two characters’ exchanges. Through their conversations, we witness character development and growth. They become so vivid, so real—like people we might actually know—that we can’t help but love them.
Why does someone like Sancho follow such an odd figure as Don Quixote on these ridiculous adventures? Though he often argues with Don Quixote, through these debates readers gradually understand the knight’s code of chivalry and the rationality and morality underlying his seemingly bizarre actions. We come to feel the moral strength and spiritual will within this frail old man, and we sense the loyal friendship and love between Sancho and Don Quixote.
This is both an absurd tale of chivalry and an anti-chivalric novel. Cervantes said he wanted to kill the chivalric romance with this book—and he succeeded. He shows us a down-and-out old man whose spiritual power far exceeds his physical appearance, only to kill him in the end. By killing the chivalric spirit, he saved it.
It’s as if he holds a knife before his own creation, looking at us and saying: “Since he’s so out of place in this world, so mad and misfit, why not let me kill him? Let him come to his senses, let him curse the beliefs he once held dear as he dies. Isn’t that what the world wants?” In that moment, the world itself seems to ache with regret: “No, his madness isn’t a problem at all. We need madmen—no, we crave madmen.” Don Quixote symbolizes fairy tales, and a world that has killed its fairy tales becomes dull, dim, and oppressive once more.
The Birth of the Modern Novel
For much of history, fiction and reality were completely separate. Writing was divided into poetry and history, with “poetry” encompassing literature, drama, and more.
What makes this the first modern novel is how it blurs fiction and reality. Readers know everything is invented, yet the characters feel real. We enter their perspectives and experience the world through their eyes.
From this point forward, literature could record truth just as history does. There’s a saying that “literature is more real than history” or “literature comes closer to truth than history”—an idea from Aristotle’s Poetics. Literature strives to capture subjective truth, while history pursues objective truth. Fiction reveals “possible” worlds that can be more real than actual history.
A Revolution in Perspective
Before Cervantes, literature was dominated by romances and narrative poetry—feudal, aristocratic, unrealistic tales featuring idealized knights on noble steeds, with stories of love, honor, adventure, and chance encounters. The narrator maintained an omniscient viewpoint, and characters remained flat, abstract, stereotypical. Readers never believed these characters were real.
Don Quixote is different. Sancho feels like your relative. The rotund village girl, the innkeeper, the shepherd, the beggar, the wanderer, the priest, the scholar, the barber—all have counterparts in your own life.
This brings us to the Renaissance innovation of perspective in painting. The principle of perspective is “fixed viewpoint.” By fixing the viewer’s position, objects establish relationships of distance, creating depth. The two-dimensional becomes three-dimensional; the image becomes real.
Cervantes applied this technique to fiction. Through a “fixed viewpoint,” we see the world through Don Quixote’s eyes and discover he isn’t mad at all. We also enter Sancho’s perspective—the ordinary person’s viewpoint, our own. These alternating viewpoints create conflict, generating their dialogue and clashes.
This is the modern world: pluralistic, conflicted, fragmented, unstable. It no longer relies on a unified system built around God, and the modern novel must respond to this reality. As readers, we hunger for more “perspectives.” We want to enter others’ minds and see through their eyes the world that God has abandoned.
The power of the novel lies in showing how others see the world. The modern novel observes the world through characters’ perspectives—this value, so familiar to us now, was pioneered by Cervantes through his use of literary perspective. We enter Don Quixote’s subjective world, feel its internal logic and rationality, develop sympathy and emotional connection with him, even crying over his fate. Though this is a ridiculous, absurd comedy, it moves readers profoundly.
A Novel About Novels
The magic of this book is that it’s a novel about novels—a meta-novel. The preface itself discusses what a preface should be: a preface about prefaces, a meta-preface. From the very beginning, the book is fictional, telling a story, mocking other works and all contemporary writers.
This self-referential quality is very postmodern—discussing itself within the novel, discussing what a novel is. It creates a recursive structure, like Escher’s “Drawing Hands,” which many have seen.
Don Quixote has two parts, separated by ten years. Remarkably, the second part discusses the first part. Characters meet Don Quixote and Sancho, saying they’re delighted to finally meet the famous pair in person, having read the novel about them. Like Escher’s drawing, the book blurs boundaries between reality and fiction, between fictional characters and readers, between readers, author, book, characters, and books-within-books. Reading it creates a dizzying sensation.
(If Cervantes is the novelist’s novelist, does that make him a meta-novelist?)
Cervantes loved playing with truth and illusion. Amusingly, in the dedication of Part Two, he wrote that the Emperor of China (Ming Dynasty) hoped he would bring Don Quixote to China to establish an academy of Spanish literature. If you look at a map, there is indeed a “Cervantes Institute” in Beijing.
The Knight’s Defeat
How was Don Quixote finally defeated? Through this same self-referential relationship. An old friend disguised as a knight defeated Don Quixote and demanded he renounce chivalry. Due to his commitment to the knight’s code, Don Quixote had to honor the victor’s demand—to abandon chivalry itself. This self-contradiction, this paradox (like the “Barber’s Paradox”), is what people online call “using magic to defeat magic”—but more complex, a form of self-destruction and self-collapse.
Through Don Quixote’s final “awakening,” Cervantes brilliantly saved what he destroyed. He killed the chivalric spirit while planting it firmly in readers’ hearts.
