D.Q. ( and not Dairy Queen)

I've come a long ways in reading Don Quixote since my last post. I am now on page 934, and have literally the very last chapter of six or seven pages to read. But, like so many a great book I have read before I put off finishing it. I have always had trouble closing a work of fiction that has taken me on so many adventures and and had be experience so many emotions. I can't bare to part with the fabulous fantasy of knights, dukes and duchess, enchanters and madmen. Another example of a favorite book of mine that I have yet to fully read is Douglas Adam's Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. True it's about 6 books long, but I can't bare for it to be over and go on my "read" shelf.








Now, many a thing have happened in the grand adventures of Sancho and our hero over the course of the last 162 pages. Sancho, even though he was succeeding and expressing the dazzling and mystifying depth of his wit and intellect, gave up being a governor. "Naked did he arrive as a governor and naked did he leave" after a stages attack on his insula. Sancho, in his wisdom, decided he wasn't able as a governor and was more suited to live as a father, husband and squire. So his family got their more impossible dreams answered, even after much protest did Sancho's wife Teresa burst with happiness and pride when she received the letters from her husband and the Duchess.

While Sancho was having his adventures, Don Quixote had his own with the staff of the Dukes estate. Cruel tricks of illusionary lovers scorned and evil cats plagued him while he stayed in the Fun House of Knights Errant. They test and tease his honor and valor and are disappointed by his grandiose responses or his shrieks of pain when they attack him.

And on page 832, I found a wonderful insight to Don Quixote's motivations to be a knight errant:
"Freedom, Sancho, is one of the most precious gifts heaven gave to men; the treasures under the earth and beneath the sea cannot compare to it; for freedom, as well as for honor, one can and should risk one's life, while captivity, on the other hand, is the greatest evil that can befall men."

I see this as not only as the core of Don Quixote's motivation and adventurous quests of a knight errant, but also as a confession of the author Cervantes himself. If we take the psychoanalysis approach we see this as Cervantes reflecting on the time he spent in prison as well as a kind of moral to live by. Live free and be happy, but live locked up and live a stunted and...not free life.









And Alas! Our hero is defeated by the vengeful Knight of the Moon, who is also the Knight of the Woods and the Knights of Mirrors, who is none other that the scurvy knave the bachelor, Senor Sanson Carrasco. So Don Quixote returns home to live a year not as a knights, as were the terms of his defeat. Sanson believes he is saving Don Quixote from the peril of living as a knights, but he is doing nothing more that sentencing Don Quixote to a prison sentence and the choking off of his freedom will very well kill him I believe.
By the end of it all Don Quixote seems more sane ever, and thus more miserable.

One of my favorite things about this novel is it's Metafictional qualities. On page 914, is the most perfound moment of metafiction I believe.
"Cide Hamete goes on to say that in his opinion the deceivers are as mad as the deceived, and that the duke and the duchess came very close to seeming like fools since hey went to such lengths to deceive two fools, who, one sleeping soundly and the other keeping watch over his unrestrained thoughts, were overtaken by daylight and filled with the desire to arise..."
I think this goes goes straight to one of the core themes of the novel, true madness. Who is more mad, the old man who lives his fictional fantasy in a world of hard reality, of the supposed sane person who goes mad over trying to either make Don Quixote sane or those who obsess over his suffering and "foolishness". In the end I see the duke and duchess as bigger fools and mad-people than Don Quixote or Sancho will ever be, for their excessive cruelty and extravagant lengths of torture.

Well, I'll end it here so I can more to write about to fill more entries :)