Don Quixote

“But I have not been able to contravene the natural order; in it, like begets like.”

In his role as the narrator, Cervantes illustrates how much his own character mirrors that of his protagonist. Like Quixote, Cervantes struggles to deal with his role in the “natural order” (28). Whereas Quixote deals with this issue by taking up the forgotten practices of the chivalric knights, Cervantes embarks on a literary satire of everything that has come before. His actions—like those of Quixote—are a struggle to deal with the present by embracing the past, thereby creating a new future.

“They marveled at so strange a form of madness and went to watch him from a distance.”

Quixote’s behavior has an innate magic all its own. Whenever he embraces his absurdity and acts in a strange manner, crowds gather. He enraptures them, as they are not used to someone who acts in such an unusual manner. Later in the novel, Quixote blames magicians for anything that goes wrong. At the same time, his own brand of magic allows him to escape dangerous situations by bewitching people with his strange "form of madness" (46) that people cannot help but watch.

“This is the best book in the world: in it knights eat, and sleep, and die in their beds, and make a will before they die, and do everything else that all the other books of this sort leave out.”

The description of the book is a foreshadowing of what will happen in the rest of Don Quixote. Throughout the story, Quixote’s