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Summaries and Short Reviews

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Shvoong Home>Books>Novels>DON QUIXOTE Summary

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DON QUIXOTE

Book Review by: CatherineGallagher    

Original Author: Miguel de Cervantes
This abstract was translated from Don Quijote
Can we change the world? For the first time in the European narrative, a fictional character is revealed against his position,
transforms what surrounds him and simultaneously it is changed for him. One of the finest works in the history of the universal literature. In 1505, in a monumental work, never before conceived, Cervantes created in Don Quixote the first great modern personage. Overwhelmed by readings that, like violent television, finally end up alienating his reason, the nobleman throws himself into the world to gain his own glorious reputation. The dissatisfaction with a reality that disgusts him makes Don Quijote capable of creating a new world, where reality and fantasy intermingle to be presented so that they feign the madness of the protagonist, when in reality what it shows us it is the aptitude to make possible the dreamed. The line between madness and the genius have never been as close as in the acts of the ingenious nobleman. His character transcends the action. Until Cervantes'' time, warriors, lovers, bards, heroes, and dragons were thrown into the pages and continued chronologically in a flat way, where they were limited to developing the action as it was demanded of them. Cervantes believes in complex characters, who evolve, and are not simply planted in the story. They go on from one state to other, and they are not the same after finishing the novel as they were when they began. They are real, with fears and weaknesses, but capable of finding in the most insignificant detail the hope to continue his adventure. Quixote and Sancho walk along in a complex world that they do not understand, which overcomes them. It is for this reason that he invents this parallel reality, where everything has more feeling for him and, clearly, less for the rest. Not only does it reproduces the reality, but it tends to replace it--and all this simultaneously with an absolutely unpredictable, ironic humor, that provides the necessary absurdities to fit in the story in a most precise way, providing a grand narrative unity.
Published: September 06, 2007
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