A Modern Gloss of Don Quijote: 1.50-52 (original) (raw)
A Modern Gloss of _Don Quijote_: 1.42-(43)
2016
Cervantes is also an excellent comedic writer. At this point, he gives us a burlesque version of the stories that we have been witnessing among the Sierra Morena lovers, the Captive and Zoraida, and now Doña Clara and the mule boy. Don Quijote is outside the inn keeping watch, and like the mule boy, he laments his fate as a “captive knight” of his beloved.
A Modern Gloss of _Don Quijote_: 2.71-74
2016
We have arrived at the last chapters of the greatest novel of all time. Any serious student of the early modern novel, or of the history of the novel form generally, must account for the final passages of Cervantes's masterpiece. Race and the Morisco problem are again present, but the definitive cure of Don Quijote's insanity is fundamental as well.
A Modern Gloss of _Don Quijote_: 1.39-41
2016
At first glance, The Captive’s Tale, which covers chapters thirty-nine to forty-one, is a military adventure. The Captive orients us by recalling the opening line of _Don Quijote_ 1.1, except that instead of referring to an unknown place in La Mancha, he begins in León and alludes explicitly to his bloodline: “Somewhere in the mountains of León my lineage had its beginnings.”
A Modern Gloss of _Don Quijote_: 1.44-46
2016
In these chapters Cervantes’s baroque style reaches a crescendo: the events at the inn unfold rapidly in a series of actions and reactions, and the case of the “bashelmet” results in the chaos of a general brawl that breaks out among the guests. To top this all off, after a lull in the action brings a moment of peace, an officer of the Holy Brotherhood attempts to arrest Don Quijote for having freed the galley slaves, giving rise to yet another pitched battle.
A Modern Gloss of _Don Quijote_: 1.36-38
2016
Perhaps the outcome of the debate delivered, and even represented, by Don Quijote between arms and letters is not so important as the fact that it symbolizes the two professional extremes lived by Cervantes himself.
A Modern Gloss of _Don Quijote_: 2.40-41
As evening approaches, Don Quijote worries that Clavileño's absence indicates that he might not be the knight designated for this adventure. But the wooden horse is finally deposited in the garden by four savages, recalling the theatrical representations at Camacho’s wedding.
A Modern Gloss of _Don Quijote_: 2.5-6
2016
Although not immediately apparent, chapters five and six contain much philosophical thinking about individual self-worth. At the same time, there are numerous hints that Cervantes thinks many of his readers have overlooked the complexity and seriousness of his art. For example, if, like the translator, we dismiss Sancho Panza’s speeches as implausible, we are unlikely to ponder their moral significance, their critique of hierarchical privilege.
A Modern Gloss of _Don Quijote_: 2.54-56
2016
Chapters fifty-four and fifty-five of part two of _Don Quijote_ are crucial to understanding Cervantes’s art of the novel. Here, more than anywhere else, our author combines two symbols: 1) the ass as the mistreated human beings of Apuleius’s anti-slavery picaresque _The Golden Ass_; and 2) the cave as the state of unenlightened philosophical ignorance in the political allegory of Plato’s _Republic_.
A Modern Gloss of _Don Quijote_: 1.28
2016
Consider the dark realism of Dorotea’s story, radically different, for example, from the pastoral world of Grisóstomo and that infinite number of “rich youths, hidalgos, and peasants” who took to the fields to lament Marcela’s rejections, throwing their sighs to the wind and carving her name into the bark of giant beech trees.