Don Quixote, born Alonso Quijano, is the protagonist of Miguel de Cervantes's two-part novel Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605, 1615), an aging minor nobleman who, having read too many romances of chivalry, loses his grip on reality and sets out as a self-styled knight-errant to revive chivalry and right the world's wrongs. Accompanied by his practical, earthy squire Sancho Panza, Quixote mistakes windmills for giants, inns for castles and peasant girls for noble ladies, his sincere and often noble intentions colliding comically and poignantly with a mundane reality that refuses to accommodate them. Widely regarded as the first modern novel, Cervantes's work made Quixote an enduring symbol of idealism pursued past the point of reason, giving the language the word quixotic for exactly that kind of impractical, high-minded folly. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
Facts
Narrative RoleSourced to the subject's own accountTitle protagonist, a minor nobleman who reinvents himself as a knight-errant 1 Defining TraitSourced to the subject's own accountDelusional but wholly sincere devotion to the codes of chivalric romance, which he insists on enacting in a world that no longer has any place for them 1 Narrative role (class)Sourced to the subject's own account Connections
Character In
Source Don Quixote, character (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors
Sources
1. Don Quixote, character (Wikipedia)
Wikipedia contributors, Wikimedia FoundationLead section
Alonso Quijano, more commonly known by his pseudonym Don Quixote, is a fictional character and the protagonist of the novel Don Quixote de la Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes.
- Character In: Don Quixote
View the Source Frequently Asked Questions
Did Cervantes write his own sequel to Don Quixote?
Yes, but only after someone else published a fake one first, in 1614, forcing Cervantes to answer it directly in his own Part Two.
In 1614, a writer using the pen name Alonso Fernandez de Avellaneda published an unauthorized continuation of Don Quixote. Cervantes, who had already been working on his own sequel, responded by finishing and publishing his authentic Part Two in 1615, in which Don Quixote and Sancho Panza have themselves heard of the false continuation and denounce it, and Cervantes has Don Quixote die at the end specifically to prevent any further impostor sequels.
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