Stefan Wolfe

Don Quixotes Transformation

               In the first volume of Don Quixote, Don Quixote as a character was considered more of a fool than a hero. Don Quixote was unaware of what people thought about him, and he didn’t care what they did. Quixote did more harm than good most of the time in the first novel as well. Some examples of this would be randomly attacking people because he thought they were kidnapping a princess, or attacking windmills thinking they were giants. Quixote was also targeted and made fun of throughout the first novel. He is considered a fool to the people that surround him and meet him on his various adventures. Quixote sees himself genuinely as a hero while others portray him to be a crazy old man who has dementia or some other disease related to old people. Throughout the first volume Quixote is taken advantage of for having these qualities. Some examples of this would be when he is told he is enchanted, and put in a cage by the priest and the barber. Characters in the first volume would basically act like they were living in his reality and tell him things that would make him do what they wanted to in their normal lives. Cervantes writing style also stays the same during the first volume of Don Quixote.

               From what we have read of the second novel of Don Quixote, we can start to see some differences in not only in Don Quixote, but also in Cervantes writing style as well. This is to be expected though, since the two volumes have a window of 10 years between them. Cervantes begins the second novel with a retaliation to a person who had plagiarized his work and had already written the second volume for him. Although Cervantes usually takes digs at things in his writing style such as politics and current leaders, we have never seen Cervantes do anything like this up until this point. Quixote also shows some very different characteristics than we have seen as well. For example, Quixote is talking to the priest and the barber in a very civilized way for once and they think that he is sane or starting to become sane. Then the topic of chivalry is brought up, and Quixote is triggered by this somehow and begins to start going back to himself, except he is not quite how he was in the first volume. Quixote in the second volume is more of an aware character, and appears to care about what other people think about him much more than he previously did. We can conclude this because Quixote asks about what the townspeople think about him. Quixote is also a lot less gullible that he was in the first volume. We see this when Quixote is brought three peasant girls but Quixote is told they are beautiful princesses he can determine that they are peasant girls, where in the first volume Quixote wouldn’t have could tell the difference between the two and accepted them as princesses. These are the main differences between Quixote in the first volume and Quixote in the second volume.