This week, we read don Quixote Vol.2 Chapters 17-25. In these chapters we see a few themes and situations that have been present in the first volume. One of the main events that happen during the chapters is the “death” of Basilio at the wedding of Camacho and Quitera. “He seized his staff, which was stuck in the ground, and pulled off the top half, which served as a sheath for a half rapier that had been hidden inside. With what might have been called the hilt stuck in the ground, with ease and a resolved determination, he leapt onto the blade, and instantly  the bloody point and half the steel edge appeared at his back, and the sad fellow was bathed in blood and stretched out, pierced by his own weapon.”

This scene could be a callback to the earlier chapters, when the shepherd committed suicide because one shepherdess wouldn’t return his love for her. This could be a sign of a cyclic narrative, where events in a story might repeat in a story, but sometimes in a different time or place. Just as Star Wars: A New Hope and The Force Awakens starts off on an old, dusty desert planet in both films, both novels start off in La Mancha and detail the quest our heroes take off on from there.

The last part of this blog post is dedicated to the movie “Lost in La Mancha”. But, I didn’t see it, so I’m going to talk about the concept of don Quixote being the subject of a movie. I it were to be released today, it would carry on the traditions of Harry Potter and Twilight in the fact that it would need two movies to give the book enough screen time (and money) to convey a compelling story. It would be hard to but Quixote on the silver screen because of the weird subplots and multiple things happening at the same time.