Don QuixoteMiguel de Cervantes
About Don Quixote
Cervantes' , published in two parts in 1605 and 1615, begins with a country gentleman who has read so many chivalric romances that he decides to become a knight-errant himself. He renames his horse, chooses a peasant woman as his lady, recruits Sancho Panza as his squire, and rides into a Spain that does not share his books.
The joke is famous: windmills become giants, inns become castles, and ordinary people are pulled into Don Quixote's imagined world whether they want to be or not. But the novel is more than a satire of bad reading. Cervantes keeps asking what imagination gives and what it damages. Don Quixote is foolish, vain, brave, ridiculous, tender, and sometimes more noble than the sane people around him.
The book belongs in the Great Conversation because it makes fiction think about itself. It asks how stories shape perception, how honor survives after the old heroic world has become comic, and whether sanity without imagination is as complete as it thinks.