Last Time on Don Quixote…

Over the week, we were assigned to read chapter nine through chapter fourteen.In chapter nine, the author, Cervantes, happens upon more pages of the tale of Don Quixote in a marketplace and buys them so the story can continue on. In those pages, Don Quixote and his faithful assistant/voice of reason Sancho Panza are taken in my sheep herders, called shepherds, and Don Quixote is given a healing salve made from rosemary to help his ear heal better. While in the company of the herders, they go to a funeral for one of their friends who committed suicide because, to quote: “and the word is that he died because of his love for that bedeviled girl of Marcela-” or to put in layman’s terms, she did not love him back. After the song, Marcela goes out and speaks at the funeral, explaining why she did not love him and how she wanted to find her own man to marry and fall in love with.

Marcela Madness

Throughout the later chapters of the selection, the text and characters give the reader the illusion that Marcela the shepherdess is some kind of demon, a cold woman who does not give any man the time of day and is frankly, kind of a jerk, but at the end of the reading we come to find out she is just a regular person who denies the customs of their current day and wants to choose her own husband. It is ironic that she turns out to be like this because Cervantes built her up to be some mean and cold person thorough the sheep herders and their words and feelings about her, but it turns out they are all biased against her because she will not return their affections.

Cervantes Tracks Down the Second Part

When we were in our groups discussing the reading selection, a lot of the group was confused as to why Cervantes would self insert himself finding the book while the story was still going on. My reasoning behind that is that it is just his sense of humor about how the narrators in fairy tales are written to give the allusion that they found this real life documentation of a knight and princess. It may also be a part of his ego bleeding through, and it wouldn’t be the first time though, because he used the book burning segment in chapter six to promote his own books and famous literary works of his colleagues, as well as purposefully letting the works of his enemies burn in the fire on purpose.

In Conclusion…

I can’t wait to read more of this book and look forward to all of the references that Cervantes will hopefully make in the future. I will admit it is a strange book about a strange man and I wonder how weird it is going to get before the end of the book, and thus ends the second blog post I have made for this class.