At the end of the first part of the story we see Don Quixote going home as a failure, but he is regrouping himself for his next adventure, which Cervantes promises will happen. We see Sancho still hoping for Don Quixote’s promise of governorship to come true. The last few chapters of the first part really sum up Don Quixote’s journeys as a whole. He is captured and put in a cage. He gets into a brawl. He gets beat up. He goes home. Throughout the first part, Don Quixote accomplished nothing. He would get beat up, then he would get up, and that would keep repeating.

Don Quixote, as a story, has been all literal. I don’t think that the story is figurative in any way. I believe that it is simply about a crazy old man going on adventures that are completely made up by Don Quixote’s mind. The reason I think this story is literal is because of the fact that Cervantes keeps trying to convince the audience that his recount of Don Quixote’s adventures are a part of history, that everything he is saying is fact, and that he is not the only one to have written about Don Quixote before.

I believe that Cervantes’ purpose of trying to convince the audience that this story is history is to make Don Quixote a more relatable character. With Don Quixote being such a static character and not developing at all and not learning anything, people can’t put themselves in his shoes. But if the audience is told that Don Quixote is real and is a part of history, people, who apparently lived in that same world, can see themselves not only in Don Quixote’s shoes but as a member of Don Quixote’s group. If people can relate to the main character, that makes the book more popular. I think that it is possible that, after reading the story, Cervantes saw that Don Quixote was static and unrelatable, so he edited parts of the story to make is seem like a historical recount.

Overall, the first part, as a whole, had a lot of repetition and comic relief. I found it interesting at points but as I read other parts I feel like I have deja vu. The repeated parts I’m talking about are whenever Don Quixote gets beat up or sees something or someone as one thing but in reality they’re something else. The comic relief comes from Don Quixote and Sancho because when they argue it is an argument between imaginary and reality, craziness and reason. The story has kind of been static with conflict arising and then getting resolved a few pages later happening multiple times. I’m hoping for less repetition and a single conflict that takes the whole story to resolve in the second part. Those specifically may not happen but I do hope the second part is different.