To call Miguel de Cervantes a great writer might be a bit of a stretch. Some of the speeches he penned in Don Quixote are worthy of filibuster status, and he seems to be a little lax on certain details as well. Sancho Panza's burro, for example, gets stolen, then magically reappears for a while, then vanishes again, having been stolen the first time. Nevertheless, when considered at a distance, the first third of the two volume work seems to have a lot to say in both its original and current context.

Cervantes is openly critical of the medieval romances which were extremely popular throughout the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance. His hero is a lampoon of your typical Arthurian knight-errant, whose sole occupation was to ride in search of adventures and right wrongs. One of my favorite side comments in service of this satire is the fact that Don Quixote sets out sans money or food because he had never seen either mentioned in the stories he read. That's akin to saying you won't use the bathroom because you never saw Batman hit the head in the movie. Quixote aside, however, what makes this book a fine send up of the romances is that Cervantes attacks the stories using their own style.

Most medieval romances were rather long affairs which were broken up episodically. Sir Thomas Mallory's Le Morte d'Arthur, for example, is a compendium of stories without a strong narrative thread. They are connected in that all the stories are about knights related to King Arthur, but from one incident to the next, the reader is not guaranteed the same characters. You might begin reading about Lancelot in one chapter, but then not hear of him again for two-hundred pages. Cervantes uses this episodic structure, breaking the story up into chapters, but does something new by keeping the narrative largely focused on his titular character. Such devotion to a single knight and, perhaps more importantly, his personality, brings the book much closer to being a modern novel than the medieval romances it mocks.

It really is the characters in this book which give it the feel of a novel, or at least an early version of the generally accepted term. The fact that Don Quixote is a flawed character is made so apparent so quickly that the reader can take it for granted throughout the story. While I think this understanding strips the story of some comedic power, the upshot is that the reader can focus on Quixote's personality rather than his actions. In that respect, Cervantes creates a man who is so hopelessly delusional that it becomes easy to read his single-mindedness from a modern context, especially as an American.

Take, for example, chapter four in book three. As Don Quixote and Sancho are riding along, they see two clouds of dust in the distance. Rather than taking the time to actually investigate the clouds, Quixote immediately decides that they are being stirred up by two armies advancing towards one another. Not only that, but he goes on to describe some of the notable knights and their weapons, pointing them out one by one. Sancho, for his part, sits on the ridge next to his master and can't see a single thing he's being told is there. All he sees is dust. When Don Quixote rides into the fray and goes on the attack, ignoring his squires cries to halt, all he kills are sheep. Turns out the clouds weren't being caused by armies, but by a pair of shepherds who happened to be taking their flocks in opposite directions on the same road. When Sancho points this out to his master (the shepherds having hightailed it away from the crazy man with the big sword), Don Quixote laughs at him. Obviously some enchanter turned the soldiers into sheep as soon as he, the mighty Don Quixote, appeared. How could Sancho not see that? It's perfectly obvious. Duh.