In Miguel De Cervantes’s novel, Don Quixote, readers must accept suspension of disbelief in order to better understand the main character and his peculiar actions. It is Don Quixote’s actions that almost make the story so unbelievable that I immediately wanted to call Cervantes’s writing a story, and not history as he liked to imply. Don Quixote is viewed primarily as a comic work or a satire of Spanish customs. However, this paper will help readers better understand why I hold such a strong opinion on Cervantes’s writing, and why I believe Don Quixote is simply a story.
Can any narrative be considered truthful? To an extent, yes. There is the term narrative truth, that I learned about in a high school English class. A narrative truth is a connection between events that cannot be fact-checked because it is based on interpretations and emotions. Likewise, a memory also has narrative truth when it captures an experience to the satisfaction of its listeners. Cervantes is recalling his memory of Don Quixote throughout the novel and in any narrative there is bias, misinterpreted events, and portions of stories unknown to the story teller.
He claims the story of Don Quixote is a history, which he has translated from a manuscript written by a Moor named Cide Hamete Benengeli. While this is a fairly large fabrication, readers are able to distinguish fact from fiction. It is easily understood that Don Quixote did not, in fact, go on the wild adventures portrayed in the book. For example, when Quixote rides into a battle against giants, Sancho tries to reason with him that the giants are just windmills and a figment of his imagination, but Quixote will not have it. On page 44, after he charges the first windmill, Quixote blames the magician Frestón for his troubles, refusing to believe he could be in the wrong, saying, “…[He] stole away my room and my books, transformed these giants into windmills, in order to deprive me of the glory of vanquishing them.” At this point, readers are less than 50 pages into the novel, and Cervantes plants doubt in their minds about the truthfulness of Quixote’s tall-tales and overall existence. Cervantes even becomes a part of his own fiction, allowing Sancho and Don Quixote to change their own histories and comment negatively on the false history published in their names.
In chapter LXXIV, Cide Hamete Benengeli says, “For me alone Don Quixote was born and I for him. His was the power of action, mine of writing.” However, at the beginning of the novel, Cervantes declares that Don Quixote is only his stepson. He basically said that he was not fully responsible for creating the character of Don Quixote. Don Quixote’s real father, according to Cervantes’s account, was Benengeli, the Moor. This is the same man whose manuscript Cervantes says he translated into Don Quixote. Benengeli’s quote almost gives the text a fake tone that leaves readers unsure who to trust or to who to credit the story of Don Quixote.
And while questioning the truthfulness of the text, one should also add that if Don Quixote was a true story about his life, then Cervantes wouldn’t have needed to defend his characters or story in the prologue. By doing so, Cervantes wants readers to see that all truth is actually constructed, in some form of a small lie. His idea of history is that the retelling of another man’s story is considered honest and fault-proof. This can be related to Aristotle’s understanding of the term “history” in a sense that the two couldn’t have more contrasting ideas.
One of Cervantes’s main ideas is that fiction and historical truth are indistinguishable, as both are dependent on the reader’s perception. I would consider Cervantes’s writing as dualistic since he often expresses different forms of thought through the pairing of opposites as with Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.
The split depicted within Cervantes’s characters in Don Quixote can be attributed to the Cervantes’s intended contrast of reality and illusion.
Don Quixote was viewed primarily as a comic work or a satire of Spanish customs.