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Analysis of Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on March 31, 2019 • ( 0 )

Many critics maintain that the impulse that prompted Miguel de Cervantes (1547 – 1616) to begin his great novel was a satiric one: He desired to satirize chivalric romances. As the elderly Alonso Quixano the Good (if that is his name) pores over the pages of these books in his study, his “brain dries up” and he imagines himself to be the champion who will take up the vanished cause of knighterrantry and wander the world righting wrongs, helping the helpless, defending the cause of justice, all for the greater glory of his lady Dulcinea del Toboso and his God.

As he leaves his village before dawn, clad in rusty armor and riding his broken-down nag, the mad knight becomes Don Quixote de la Mancha. His first foray is brief, and he is brought back home by friends from his native village. Despite the best efforts of his friends and relations, the mad old man embarks on a second journey, this time accompanied by a peasant from his village, Sancho Panza, who becomes the knight’s squire. The Don insists on finding adventure everywhere, mistaking windmills for giants, flocks of sheep for attacking armies, puppet shows for real life. His squire provides a voice of down-to-earth reason, but Quixote always insists that vile enchanters have transformed the combatants to embarrass and humiliate him. Don Quixote insists on his vision of the ideal in the face of the cold facts of the world; Sancho Panza maintains his proverbial peasant wisdom in the face of his master’s madness.

In their travels and adventures, they encounter life on the roads of Spain. Sometimes they are treated with respect— for example, by “the gentleman in green” who invites them to his home and listens to Quixote with genuine interest—but more often they are ridiculed, as when the Duke and Duchess bring the knight and squire to their estate only for the purpose of mocking them. Finally, a young scholar from Quixote’s native village, Sampson Carrasco, defeats the old knight in battle and forces him to return to his home, where he dies peacefully, having renounced his mad visions and lunatic behavior.

While it is necessary to acknowledge the satiric intent of Cervantes’ novel, the rich fictional world of Don Quixote de la Mancha utterly transcends its local occasion. On the most personal level, the novel can be viewed as one of the most intimate evaluations of a life ever penned by a great author. When Don Quixote decides to take up the cause of knight-errantry, he opens himself to a life of ridicule and defeat, a life that resembles Cervantes’ own life, with its endless reversals of fortune, humiliations, and hopeless struggles. Out of this life of failure and disappointment Cervantes created the “mad knight,” but he also added the curious human nobility and the refusal to succumb to despair in the face of defeat that turns Quixote into something more than a comic character or a ridiculous figure to be mocked. Although there are almost no points in the novel where actual incidents from Cervantes’ life appear directly or even transformed into fictional disguise, the tone and the spirit, the succession of catastrophes with only occasional moments of slight glory, and the resilience of human nature mark the novel as the most personal work of the author, the one where his singularly difficult life and his profoundly complex emotional responses to that life found form and structure.

If the novel is the record of Cervantes’ life, the fiction also records a moment in Spanish national history when fortunes were shifting and tides turning. At the time of Cervantes’ birth, Spain’s might and glory were at their peak. The wealth from conquests of Mexico and Peru returned to Spain, commerce boomed, and artists recorded the sense of national pride with magnificent energy and power. By the time Don Quixote de la Mancha was published, the Spanish Empire was beginning its decline. A series of military disasters, including the defeat of the Spanish Armada by the English and the revolt of Flanders, had shaken the once mighty nation. In the figure of Don Quixote, the greatest of a richly remembered past combines with the hard facts of age, weakness, and declining power. The character embodies a moment of Spanish history and the Spanish people’s own sense of vanishing glory in the face of irreversible decline.

Don Quixote de la Mancha also stands as the greatest literary embodiment of the Counter-Reformation. Throughout Europe, the Reformation was moving with the speed of new ideas, changing the religious landscape of country after country. Spain stood proud as a Catholic nation, resisting any changes. Standing alone against the flood of reform sweeping Europe displayed a kind of willed madness, but the nobility and determination of Quixote to fight for his beliefs, no matter what the rest of the world maintained, reflects the strength of the Spanish will at this time. Cervantes was a devout and loyal believer, a supporter of the Church, and Don Quixote may be the greatest fictional Catholic hero, the battered knight of the Counter-Reformation.

The book also represents fictionally the various sides of the Spanish spirit and the Spanish temper. In the divisions and contradictions found between the Knight of the Sad Countenance and his unlikely squire, Sancho Panza, Cervantes paints the two faces of the Spanish soul: The Don is idealistic, sprightly, energetic, and cheerful, even in the face of overwhelming odds, but he is also overbearing, domineering Sancho, who is earthy, servile, and slothful. The two characters seem unlikely companions and yet they form a whole, the one somehow incomplete without the other and linked throughout the book through their dialogues and debates. In drawing master and servant, Cervantes presents the opposing truths of the spirit of his native land.

Characterization

The book can also be seen as a great moment in the development of fiction, the moment when the fictional character was freed into the real world of choice and change. When the gentleman of La Mancha took it into his head to become a knight-errant and travel through the world redressing wrongs and winning eternal glory, the face of fiction permanently changed. Character in fiction became dynamic, unpredictable, and spontaneous. Until that time, character in fiction had existed in service of the story, but now the reality of change and psychological energy and freedom of the will became a permanent hallmark of fiction, as it already was of drama and narrative poetry. The title character’s addled wits made the new freedom all the more impressive. The determination of Don Quixote, the impact of his vision on the world, and the world’s hard reality as it impinges on the Don make for shifting balances and constant alterations in fortune that are psychologically believable. The shifting balance of friendship, devotion, and perception between the knight and his squire underlines this freedom, as does the power of other characters in the book to affect Don Quixote’s fortunes directly: the niece, the housekeeper, the priest, the barber, Sampson Carrasco, the Duke, and the Duchess. There is a fabric of interaction throughout the novel, and characters in the novel change as they encounter new adventures, new people, and new ideas.

One way Cervantes chronicles this interaction is in dialogue. Dialogue had not played a significant or defining role in fiction before Don Quixote de la Mancha . As knight and squire ride across the countryside and engage in conversation, dialogue becomes the expression of character, idea, and reality. In the famous episode with windmills early in the first part of the novel (when Quixote views the windmills on the plain and announces that they are giants that he will wipe from the face of the earth, and Sancho innocently replies, “What giants?”), the dialogue not only carries the comedy but also becomes the battleground on which the contrasting visions of life engage one another—to the delight of the reader. The long exchanges between Don Quixote and Sancho Panza provide priceless humor but also convey two different realities that meet, struggle, and explode in volleys of words. In giving his characters authentic voices that carry ideas, Cervantes brought to fiction a new truth that remains a standard of comparison.

The Narrator

Don Quixote de la Mancha is also as modern as the most experimental of later fiction. Throughout the long novel, Cervantes plays with the nature of the narrator, raising constant difficult questions as to who is telling the story and to what purpose. In the riotously funny opening page of the novel, the reader encounters a narrator not only unreliable but also lacking in the basic facts necessary to tell the story. He chooses not to tell the name of the village where his hero lives, and he is not even sure of his hero’s name, yet the narrator protests that the narrative must be entirely truthful.

In chapter 9, as Don Quixote is preparing to do battle with the Basque, the narrative stops; the narrator states that the manuscript from which he is culling this story is mutilated and incomplete. Fortunately, some time later in Toledo, he says, he came upon an old Arabic manuscript by Arab historian Cide Hamete Benengeli that continues the adventures. For the remainder of the novel, the narrator claims to be providing a translation of this manuscript—the manuscript and the second narrator, the Arab historian, both lacking authority and credibility. In the second part of the novel, the narrator and the characters themselves are aware of the first part of the novel as well as of a “false Quixote,” a spurious second part written by an untalented Spanish writer named Avallaneda who sought to capitalize on the popularity of the first part of Don Quixote de la Mancha by publishing his own sequel. The “false Quixote” is on the narrator’s mind, the characters’ minds, and somehow on the mind of Cide Hamete Benengeli. These shifting perspectives, the multiple narrative voices, the questionable reliability of the narrators, and the “false” second part are all tricks, narrative sleight of hand as complex as anything found in the works of Faulkner , Vladimir Nabokov , or Jorge Luis Borges . In his Lectures on Don Quixote (1983), Nabokov oddly makes no reference to Cervantes’ narrative games; perhaps the old Spanish master’s shadow still loomed too close to the modern novelist.

None of these approaches to the novel, however, appropriate as they may be, can begin to explain fully the work’s enduring popularity or the strange manner in which the knight and his squire have ridden out of the pages of a book into the other artistic realms of orchestral music, opera, ballet, and painting, where other artists have presented their visions of Quixote and Sancho.Acurrent deeper and more abiding than biography, history, national temper, or literary landmark flows through the book and makes it speak to all manner of readers in all ages.

Early in the novel, Cervantes begins to dilute his strong satiric intent. The reader can laugh with delight at the inanity of the mad knight but never with the wicked, unalloyed glee that pure satire evokes. The knight begins to loom over the landscape; his madness brushes sense; his ideals demand defense. The reader finds him- or herself early in the novel taking an attitude equivalent to that of the two young women of easy virtue who see Quixote when he arrives at an inn, which he believes to be a castle, on his first foray. Quixote calls them “two beauteous maidens . . . taking air at the gate of the castle,” and they fall into helpless laughter, confronted with such a mad vision of themselves as “maidens.” In time, however, because of Quixote’s insistence on the truth of his vision, they help him out of his armor and set a table for him. They treat him as a knight, not as a mad old fool; he treats them as ladies, and they behave as ladies. The laughter stops, and, for a pure moment, life transforms itself and human beings transcend themselves.

Contradictions

This mingling of real chivalry and transcendent ideals with the absurdity of character and mad action creates the tensions in the book as well as its strange melancholy beauty and haunting poignancy. The book is unlike any other ever written. John Berryman has commented on this split between the upheld ideal and the riotously real, observing that the reader “does not know whether to laugh or cry, and does both.” This old man with his dried-up brain, with his squire who has no “salt in his brain pan,” with his rusty armor, his pathetic steed, and his lunatic vision that changes windmills into giants and flocks of sheep into attacking armies, this crazy old fool becomes a real knight-errant. The true irony of the book and its history is that Don Quixote actually becomes a model for knighthood. He may be a foolish, improbable knight, but with his squire, horse, and armor he has ridden into the popular imagination of the world not only as a ridiculous figure but also as a champion; he is a real knight whose vision may often cloud, who sees what he wants to see, but he is also one who demonstrates real virtue and courage and rises in his rhetoric and daring action to real heights of greatness.

Perhaps Cervantes left a clue as to the odd shift in his intention. The contradictory titles he assigns to his knight suggest this knowledge. The comic, melancholy strain pervades “Knight of the Sad Countenance” in the first part of the novel, and the heroic strain is seen in the second part when the hero acquires the new sobriquet “Knight of the Lions.” The first title comes immediately after his adventure with a corpse and is awarded him by his realistic companion, Sancho. Quixote has attacked a funeral procession, seeking to avenge the dead man. Death, however, cannot be overcome; the attempted attack merely disrupts the funeral, and the valiant knight breaks the leg of an attending churchman. The name “Knight of the Sad Countenance” fits Quixote’s stance here and through much of the book. Many of the adventures he undertakes are not only misguided but also unwinnable. Quixote may be Christlike, but he is not Christ, and he cannot conquer Death.

The adventure with the lions earns for him his second title and offers the other side of his journey as a knight. Encountering a cage of lions being taken to the king, Quixote becomes determined to fight them. Against all protest, he takes his stand, and the cage is opened. One of the lions stretches, yawns, looks at Quixote, and lies down. Quixote proclaims a great victory and awards himself the name “Knight of the Lions.” A delightfully comic episode, the scene can be viewed in two ways—as a nonadventure that the knight claims as a victory or as a genuine moment of triumph as the knight undertakes an outlandish adventure and proves his genuine bravery while the king of beasts realizes the futility of challenging the unswerving old knight. Quixote, by whichever route, emerges as conqueror. Throughout his journeys, he often does emerge victorious, despite his age, despite his illusions, despite his dried-up brain.

When, at the book’s close, he is finally defeated and humiliated by Sampson Carrasco and forced to return to his village, the life goes out of him. The knight Don Quixote is replaced, however, on the deathbed by Alonso Quixano the Good. Don Quixote does not die, for the elderly gentleman regains his wits and becomes a new character. Don Quixote cannot die, for he is the creation of pure imagination. Despite the moving and sober conclusion, the reader cannot help but sense that the death scene being played out does not signify the end of Don Quixote. The knight escapes and remains free. He rides out of the novel, with his loyal companion Sancho at his side, into the golden realm of myth. He becomes the model knight he hoped to be. He stands tall with his spirit, his ideals, his rusty armor, and his broken lance as the embodiment of man’s best intentions and impossible folly. As Dostoevski so wisely said, when the Lord calls the Last Judgment, man should take with him this book and point to it, for it reveals all of man’s deep and fatal mystery, his glory and his sorrow.

Major works Plays: El trato de Argel, pr. 1585 (The Commerce of Algiers, 1870); Ocho comedias y ocho entremeses nuevos, 1615 (includes Pedro de Urdemalas [Pedro the Artful Dodger, 1807], El juez de los divorcios [The Divorce Court Judge, 1919], Los habladores [Two Chatterboxes, 1930], La cueva de Salamanca [The Cave of Salamanca, 1933], La elección de los alcaldes de Daganzo [Choosing a Councilman in Daganzo, 1948], La guarda cuidadosa [The Hawk-Eyed Sentinel, 1948], El retablo de las maravillas [The Wonder Show, 1948], El rufián viudo llamada Trampagos [Trampagos the Pimp Who Lost His Moll, 1948], El viejo celoso [The Jealous Old Husband, 1948], and El vizcaíno fingido [The Basque Imposter, 1948]); El cerco de Numancia, pb. 1784 (wr. 1585; Numantia: A Tragedy, 1870; also known as The Siege of Numantia); The Interludes of Cervantes, 1948. poetry: Viaje del Parnaso, 1614 (The Voyage to Parnassus, 1870).

Bibliography Bloom, Harold, ed. Cervantes. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. _______. Cervantes’s “Don Quixote.” Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2001. Cascardi, Anthony J., ed. The Cambridge Companion to Cervantes. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Castillo, David R. (A)wry Views: Anamorphosis, Cervantes, and the Early Picaresque. West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 2001. Close, A. J. Cervantes and the Comic Mind of His Age. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Durán, Manuel. Cervantes. New York: Twayne, 1974. Hart, Thomas R. Cervantes’ Exemplary Fictions: A Study of the “Novelas ejemplares.” Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1994. McCrory, Donald P. No Ordinary Man: The Life and Times of Miguel de Cervantes. Chester Springs, Pa.: Peter Owen, 2002. Mancing, Howard. Cervantes’ “Don Quixote”: A Reference Guide. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2006. Nabokov, Vladimir. Lectures on “Don Quixote.” Edited by Fredson Bowers. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983. Riley, E. C. Cervantes’s Theory of the Novel. 1962. Reprint. Newark, Del.: Juan de la Cuesta, 1992. Weiger, John G. The Substance of Cervantes. London: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Williamson, Edwin, ed. Cervantes and the Modernists: The Question of Influence. London: Tamesis, 1994. Source :  Rollyson, Carl. Critical Survey Of Long Fiction . 4th ed. New Jersey: Salem Press, 2010

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"DON QUIXOTE BY MIGUEL DE CERVANTES" - A Review Essay

A 3-page review essay about the novel Don Quixote.

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Anthony Bergs

Research paper on Don Quixote

Anthony J CASCARDI

The Cambridge Companion to Cervantes Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605) is one of the classic texts of Western litera-ture and the foundation of European fiction. Yet Cervantes himself remains an enigmatic figure. The Cambridge Companion to Cervantes offers a compre-hensive ...

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Phillip Y Freiberg

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra was a Renaissance writer at the time of the Spanish "golden age". His novel “Don Quixote” (The Ingenious Nobleman Mister Quixote of La Mancha) published in 1605 and in 1615 is a story about Alonso Quixano-a ruined Hidalgo. When “his wits being quite gone” (1, I) he imagines himself to be a knight -Don Quixote La Mancha. Together with his arms bearer Sancho Panza (local peasant) he wanders through Spain in search of adventures, but encounters many calamities.

David Purificato

Translated into dozens of languages and published thousands of times in numerous countries around the world in its 411 years of existence, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra’s (1547-1616) The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote of La Mancha has attained recognition as one of the most read books in western culture. Various reproductions of Don Quixote over the last four centuries include parodies, plays, paintings and illustrations, cartoons, comic books, movies and music. Of the many text editions in existence today this short study will address a particular copy of Cervantes Don Quixote: The History of the valorous and witty-knight-errant Don Quixote of La Mancha, Translated out of the Spanish [by T. Shelton] now newly corrected and amended (1652), along with a few of the people who produced this seminal work and several of the notable individuals who have owned it through time.

The Journal of Undergraduate Research

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Although best known the world over for his masterpiece novel, Don Quixote de la Mancha, published in two parts in 1605 and 1615, the antics of the would-be knight-errant and his simple squire only represent a fraction of the trials and tribulations, both in the literary world and in society at large, of this complex man. Poet, playwright, soldier, slave, satirist, novelist, political commentator, and literary outsider, Cervantes achieved a minor miracle by becoming one of the rarest of things in the early modern world of letters: an international best-seller during his lifetime, with his great novel being translated into multiple languages before his death in 1616. The principal objective of the Oxford Handbook of Cervantes is to create a resource in English that provides a fully comprehensive overview of the life, works, and influences of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547–1616). This volume contains seven sections, exploring in depth Cervantes’s life and how the trials, tribulatio...

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Theme of Journey in Don Quixote

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“Don Quixote” by Cervantes: Character Analysis Essay

In the novel Don Quixote, Cervantes depicts two opposite characters of Alonso Quixano and Sancho Panza. Don Quixote and Sancho are opposite personalities, each representing a different kind of sense. It is possible to say that Don Quixote is deprived “reason and the moral sense” of judgment and understanding, while Sancho possesses “reason” and “imagination”. Cervantes symbolically represents simple, contradictory elements rather than as complex and independent literary characters.

Physical differences and appearance allow Cervantes to unveil and underline different views and values of Don Quixote and Sancho. The long, thin, Grecoesque figure of Don Quixote underlines his nobility and idealism. Cervantes portrays that in the midst of the natural grandeur of the Sierra Morena, and, whether fighting windmills or wineskins, amongst goatherds or noblemen, hanging from his wrist or addressing the company gathered at the inn, he is always indisputably the center of attention.

Sancho, in contrast, is a fat rustic with a week-old beard, or a dark ogre from an oriental fairy tale. He is seen in the very first plate almost literally melting on his ass, his face a shapeless and grotesque ball. Don Quixote id depicted as a Romantic symbol, a heroic and idealistic figure whose laughable misadventures are turned into mythical feats. Cervantes portrays Sancho as buffoon and greedy villager of previous centuries, as a symbol of everything the Romantics considered ignoble, base, or earthy.

The main difference between the characters is perception of the world and human values: Don Quixote is depicted as idealist who believes in universal love, happiness and honesty while Sancho is depicted as a materialist who rejects human morality and values. Don Quixote says:

I may have won some kingdom that has others dependent upon it, which will be just the thing to enable thee to be crowned king of one of them. “In that case,” said Sancho Panza, “if I should become a king by one of those miracles your worship speaks of, even Juana Gutierrez, my old woman, would come to be queen and my children infantes” (Cervantes 2000).

Both Sancho’s sense of humor and his good sense show palpably from the very beginning and remain unchanged, though obviously not constant, throughout the novel. Sancho never oversteps the fine border-line that separates what is harmlessly and amusingly funny from what is abusive or at the expense or to the detriment of another person or animal. There is a change in Sancho’s personality between Parts I and II. In the last chapters of Part I Don Quixote is depicted as a madman who needs to be caged, and most of his idealism of the early chapters has subsided; hence, Sancho’s good sense and love for his master become more evident.

Also, in Part II Cervantes’s other characters begin to appreciate and praise, if not fully understand all the complexities of, Sancho’s keen sense of humor. A more important reason for this more favorable image of Sancho projected by the text is a drastic structural change that Cervantes decided upon between the writing of the Parts. This change in the technique of the narration in some degree conditions the perception readers have of the characters. In contrast to Sancho, the main features of Don Quixote are excessive self-confidence, serious lack of self-knowledge, and blindness to the unbridgeable chasm that lies between stations in life and those to which he aspires.

The theme of idealism prevails in this novel unveiling true human values and eternal love, friendly relations and romance. Idealism is found in relations between Don Quixote and Sancho that binds master and squire together, their gradual adaptation to one another and to new or changing circumstances, and their sincere need of and love for the other. There are inconsistencies n the character of the squire, though one of the inconsistent traits is always clearly dominant.

Sancho is presented now as a thief and highwayman, then as honest and compassionate. His great love for his ass is at times non existent, as when Sancho uses him as a shield to avoid being stoned or hurt; none the less, he is eager to continue with his master despite the voice of common sense that gnaws at his mind. Don Quixote idealizes his love to Dulcinea and becomes extreme naive in matters of love, his relentless pursuit of preferment, and his blind confidence in his nonexistent qualifications for office, all of which remind one of Sancho. Wanting to make “a world of his own”, he becomes a victim of this ego and dreams. His ambition to possess is ironically paralleled by a process of deep loss; his desire to expand his dreams is undercut by a process of systematic denudation (Eisner 43).

In real life, ideals and dreams allow us to achieve success and realize our desires. On the other hand, a person should avoid illusions and false ideals which can cause frustrations and desperation. Illusion is a distorted perception of reality and false interpretation of reality. Moral idealism of this sort keeps well in the heart of the adolescent, responsibility and change, and the equivocality and impermanence of human affairs have impressed the mind.

Idealism is not a a bad thing because it helps to follow humanistic values, a moral philosophy. A person can follow dreams and ideals if he/she is sure about their realization or if these false (unachievable) dream do not ruin life and destiny of a person. Simple ideals underlie decent behavior and dramatize the truths of the human heart. For instance, romantic idealism can suggest passion and true love, happiness and universal values. In order to avoid illusions, a person should take into account his/her past and plan his/her future in accordance with life chances and visible perspectives.

Cervantes, M. Don Quixote. 2000. Web.

Eisner, W. The Last Knight: An Introduction to Don Quixote. Yale University Press, 2005.

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Bibliography

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Don Quixote -- Genre Essay

<I>Don Quixote</I>, one of the first novels ever written, was instrumental in the development of the modern novel.

The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote de la Mancha is one of the first novels ever composed, written in 1604 by Miguel de Cervantes, a noted Spanish author. Don Quixote is a satirical picaresque romance that was written in response to the many exaggerated chivalric romances of Cervantes? time. It contains many insights into the human psyche, and the collective consciousness? reasonings. I feel that the main meaning in Don Quixote is society?s failure to accept a deviation from the norm. There are many reasons for my opinion on this, as shall be outlined below. A romance is ?a fictional story in verse and prose that relates improbable adventures of idealized characters in some remote or enchanted setting?. This description of Romantic form fits Don Quixote like a glove. Peppered with verse every few chapters and telling the story of a Spanish nobleman (Don Quixote de la Mancha) who, because of reading too many tales of chivalry, comes to think that he is a knight who must combat the world's injustices. His imagination usually runs away with him, and he thinks that windmills are giants, flocks of sheep are enemy armies and roadside inns are castles. Don Quixote is Cervantes? brilliant representation of whimsy and a free and open imagination, constantly at odds with the logic and cruelty of the real world. As a stereotype with such fancies and eccentricities, Don Quixote stands for the values of living free in your own fantasy world, and yet he is still such a well-rounded and individual character. The reader often sees into the psyche of the Don, and is often positioned to collude with Don Quixote?s ideals and values, making them their own. Sancho Panza (Don Quixote?s squire) is the balance to Don Quixote in the story. He is the complete opposite of the Don, always prepared to sit down and think things out, and run away from a situation if necessary. His balancing force on Don Quixote (and the Don on him) saves them both from dangerous situations, and is an excellent depiction of the Yin/Yang relationship. The fact that Don Quixote is a picaresque romance automatically determines the setting. With a picaresque story (originating in Spain in the 16th century and coming from the Spanish picaro, meaning rogue), the term lends itself to a plot where the bulk of the action takes place on the road, and on a journey, and in which eccentric and low-life characters appear. Picaresque stories (especially romances) such as Don Quixote allow a statement of man?s freedom and independence, but the picaro of the story often invokes a counter-balancing, restraining oppression of free society, as shown in Don Quixote. Cervantes has done well to show such values in such a short book as Don Quixote, satirizing the society in which he lived in early 17th century Spain. The setting of the road allows Cervantes to take Don Quixote out to places where he can experience remote and dangerous adventures? although he never actually does. Cervantes holds a third person point of view for much of the book, breaking in occasionally into second person as the ?translator? of the story (from Moorish to Spanish) to inform the reader of certain things of which they should be aware. This combination of complete omniscience partnered with a translator popping in every so often creates a sense that the story really is absolutely true, and there really was an eccentric gentleman called Don Quixote running around Spain at the end of the 16th century. The reader is convinced by the irrepressible high spirit of the ?narrator? and the God-like perspective on the scene that the story is true, and therefore that the meanings and values of the story are true as well, because all angles of the story are given. The fact that various idioms and colloquialisms are inserted into the many conversations in the book but serve only to enhance the believability, and the chronological order of the chapters adds the icing to the already realistic cake. Don Quixote is a romance, meaning it ?relates improbable adventures of idealized characters?. It sets improbable and idealized characters against the odds, making them battle the corruption and baseness of the world and the elements. The elements also play a key part in defining the genre and the meaning. Don Quixote is a picaresque romance, implying that it is set outdoors on the open road, once again making the characters (roguish picaros) battle the elements and the cruelty of the real world to survive. It challenges society?s failure to accept a deviation from the norm by having a character that invokes an animosity to society in the readers. The fact that Don Quixote is a satirical picaresque romance adds to the meaning. All satires go to extremes to challenge the dominant cultural identity of the time, and Don Quixote is no exception, as it challenges society?s failure to accept a deviation from the norm. Finally, the complete omniscience coupled with varying degrees of 2nd person view adds realism. The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote de la Mancha is a novel that challenges society?s failure to accept a deviation from the norm, using a satirical picaresque romantic genre. People should always hold this meaning, as if we do not accept a deviation then we will never approve of anything. Don Quixote challenges failure to accept a deviation from the norm.

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Michael Sugrue, 66, Dies; His Talks on Philosophy Were a YouTube Hit

After an academic career spent in near obscurity, he became an internet phenomenon during the pandemic by uploading talks he had given three decades earlier.

By Trip Gabriel

The college lecturer, in a uniform of rumpled khakis and corduroy blazer, paces on a small stage, head down. “The lectures you’re about to see,” he says in introducing a series of talks, videotaped in somewhat hokey lo-fi style in 1992, “cover the last 3,000 years of Western intellectual history.”

The lecturer, Michael Sugrue, would go on to teach Plato, the Bible, Kant and Kierkegaard to two generations of undergraduates, including for 12 years at Princeton, without ever publishing a book — an academic who hadn’t “really had a career,” as he told The American Conservative after retiring in 2021.

But that same year, in the depths of the pandemic, Dr. Sugrue uploaded his three-decade-old philosophy lectures to YouTube , where many thousands of people whose aperture on the world had narrowed to a laptop screen discovered them. His talk on the Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius , in particular, seemed to fit the jittery mood of lockdown, when many people sought a sense of self-sufficiency amid the chaos of the outside world. It has now been viewed 1.5 million times.

“The only matter of concern to a wise and philosophic individual is the things completely under your control,” Dr. Sugrue lectured, iterating Stoic thought. “You can’t control the weather, you can’t control other people, you can’t control the society around you.”

Dr. Sugrue, who became an internet phenomenon through word of mouth — without publicity or viral links from social media — after an academic career spent in near obscurity, died on Jan. 16 in Naples, Fla. He was 66.

His death, in hospice care, was not widely reported at the time. His sister, Kate Kavanagh-Scheuer, said the cause was complications of prostate cancer.

Dr. Sugrue (pronounced suh-GREW) received a bachelor’s degree in history in 1979 from the University of Chicago, where he studied under the classicist Allan Bloom. He went on to earn his master’s and Ph.D. in history at Columbia University. Throughout his career, he jumped outside the lanes of academic history departments to teach what he called “landmarks in Western culture,” which to him included philosophy, Shakespeare, Dickens, Freud, the Bible and even John Coltrane.

“His command of the Western tradition was just off the charts, and he also understood global history in a profound way,” Roger W. Nutt, the provost of Ave Maria University in Florida, where Dr. Sugrue taught late in his career, said in an email. “He knew and loved often neglected ancient and modern thinkers and had an incredible gift of familiarity with thinkers and texts separated by years — sometimes thousands.”

In 1992, Dr. Sugrue was hired to contribute lectures to a series called “Great Minds of the Western Intellectual Tradition.” The talks, for the Teaching Company, were originally sold as VHS tapes and as audio recordings aimed at commuters in their cars.

Dr. Sugrue’s contributions to the “Great Minds” series were so successful that the Teaching Company had him lecture on other topics: the Bible and Western literature, the Platonic dialogues. He uploaded some 56 of his talks to his YouTube channel, where they spread his small reputation to a somewhat less small audience.

In the lectures, delivered on a poorly lit makeshift set years before the era of slick TED Talks, he speaks fluidly and passionately without notes for 45 minutes at a stretch. In total, they have been viewed some two million times.

“He’s an incredibly charismatic lecturer,” Darren Staloff, a colleague from the Columbia Ph.D. program who also contributed to the “Great Minds” series, said in an interview. “He had two skills: One is the ability to summarize in a very cogent way the main points for a general audience. The second point is that he wants the audience to know why they should care. This is about how you should live your life and what things mean.”

Dr. Sugrue presented, without judgment, a wide breadth of moral and intellectual viewpoints from sources including Plato, the Old Testament prophets, Karl Marx, Kierkegaard’s Christian existentialism and Nietzsche. In explaining Kant’s view that the human mind is not a tabula rasa receiving impressions of the world but in fact constructs reality in the act of perception, he quoted a line from a T.S. Eliot poem: “The roses had the look of flowers that are looked at.”

“Isn’t that beautiful?” he said. “That just gets it all together.”

At a time when ascent of the academic rungs is tied to scholarly output and liberal arts departments face cratering enrollment, Dr. Sugrue pursued the often maligned art of classroom teaching. Ian Fletcher, an adviser to a nonprofit group representing U.S. manufacturers, who took courses from Dr. Sugrue at Columbia in the mid-1980s, said in an email that Dr. Sugrue was “the best teacher anyone he ever taught ever had.”

His pedagogic method was “truly astonishing,” John Byron Kuhner, an author and bookstore owner who was a student of Dr. Sugrue’s at Princeton in the 1990s, wrote in a reminiscence for National Review. He would begin classes, Mr. Kuhner recalled, with eight blackboards full of cryptic notes. Seated on a desk, he led his seminars of more than 150 students by posing a series of Socratic questions.

“Sugrue would get through almost all his blackboard notes every class, proceeding entirely on audience initiative,” Mr. Kuhner wrote.

Dr. Sugrue was never on a tenure track at Princeton. Over the course of his dozen years there, beginning in 1992, he was a Behrman fellow, a lecturer for the interdepartmental Humanities Council and a fellow in the politics department.

In 2004, he became chair of the history department of Ave Maria University, a startup Roman Catholic institution near Naples, Fla., founded by the creator of Domino’s Pizza. He taught there for nearly two decades.

Michael Joseph Sugrue was born on Feb. 1, 1957, in Queens, the eldest of four children of Michael Sugrue, an Irish-born owner of pubs and restaurants in New York, and Margaret Mary (Clancy) Sugrue, who managed the home. The family lived in Lynbrook, N.Y., on Long Island.

Besides his sister, Dr. Sugrue, whose one marriage ended in divorce, is survived by a brother, Christopher, and three daughters, Thalia, Pamela and Genevieve.

After Dr. Sugrue was discovered online, he continued to offer new lectures on his YouTube channel, on subjects including Dostoyevsky, “Don Quixote” and “Othello,” as well as recording conversations with his old colleague and friend Dr. Staloff.

The circa-1992 academic in large square glasses had metamorphosed, in the recent lectures, into a bearish man with untamed white chin whiskers. But the low-tech look of the original videos persisted into the Zoom era, and he lost none of his passion for explicating ideas, or his indifference to publishing.

“I’ve been working intermittently on a history of the world,” he revealed in one recent talk. “I’ve a chunk written, but even more to go.”

Trip Gabriel is a national correspondent. He covered the past two presidential campaigns and has served as the Mid-Atlantic bureau chief and a national education reporter. He formerly edited the Styles sections. He joined The Times in 1994. More about Trip Gabriel