Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra’s Don Quixote is known worldwide. Cervantes started the novel Don Quixote in 1605. Cervantes, born in 1547, grew up in the Spanish university town of Alcala de Henares. He was born into a once proud and influential family who had fallen on hard times. Very little is known of Cervantes’s early life in Spain. The creator of Don Quixote had aspirations of becoming a professional soldier. In 1571 Cervantes took part in the Battle of Lepanto where he was wounded and lost the use of his left hand. Captured by the Turks in 1575, Cervantes was imprisoned for five years where he made a name for himself for his repeated and daring escape attempts.
The Trinitarian friars finally ransomed Cervantes in 1580. When he returned to Spain he found his family poorer than before he left. He settled down to a literary career having hopes of becoming a successful playwright in order to support his family. Cervantes did gain a measure of fame brought by his characters Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. In 1605, at the age of 55, Cervantes wrote Part I of Don Quixote. In 1614 a writer, Alonzo Fernandez de Avellaneda, wrote a sequel to Cervantes’s part I. When Cervantes learned of this he wrote his version of Part II. In his prologue he condemned the intrusion by Avellaneda and promised to kill off Don Quixote in the finale to ensure no one else would invade his work. Upon completing what he set out to do, in 1616, Cervantes died.
The book is mainly set in “La Mancha in south-central Spain”. Don Quixote’s home is located in a town in this area. His travels take him across fields, past shepherds with herds of goats, and in and out of different inns. Cervantes never makes it clear as to the time period Don Quixote is set in. The writer mentions, “society has moved beyond its chivalric past,”. This suggests that Spain is beginning to move beyond the middle ages, or possibly set during the renaissance. The plot of the novel is about a man known only as Don Quixote. It is a name he gives himself at the beginning of the novel. He is portrayed as an avid reader of books on knight errantry and chivalry. Quixote decides to take up a quest as the famous people he so enjoys reading about,
“valorous knights who dedicated themselves to lofty goals and to beautiful damsels for whom they were willing to risk everything.”
This is the root that initiates Quixote to take up a journey himself. Much like the knights in the books he reads about he decides to fight in the name of a beautiful damsel, “At last he resolved to call her Dulcinea of El Toboso…”. Don Quixote is completely enamoured with Dulcinea and hopes that one day she will reciprocate his love. It is clear however in the novel that she does not know whom he is. On Don Quixote’s first sally he travels alone and finds himself at an inn, “no sooner did he see the inn than it assumed in his eyes the semblance of a castle with four turrets…”
