Don Quixote's Ambiguous Debt

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Miguel de Cervantes wrote a genuine picaresque novella, Rinconete y Cortadillo, following two young thieves through Seville's criminal underworld in a structure that could sit comfortably beside Lazarillo de Tormes. Don Quixote is a stranger case. Its own hero is a minor gentleman gone mad on chivalric romance, not a low-born rogue, and its own targets are the romances Cervantes read rather than the church or the state Lazarillo took aim at. Yet the novel borrows the picaresque's episodic road structure, its string of encounters with a cross-section of Spanish society, and its interest in how a narrator's own account of events can be unreliable, this time not through a servant's self-interest but through a hero's own delusion. Cervantes's relationship to the picaresque tradition is best read as neither membership nor rejection, an author working with the genre's tools while building something the genre itself could not quite contain.