Don Quixote: Cervantes' Style and the Birth of the Modern Novel

Cervantes' Narrative Style

Cervantes' work reflects a Mannerist style, positioned between the simplicity and naturalness of the Renaissance and the complexity and artifice of the Baroque. His style successfully adapts to the needs of a broad audience, blending the popular, proverb-filled speech of Sancho Panza with idealized, bucolic landscapes. The narrative combines religious and archaic elements, a parody of chivalric romances, and a plain, intimate, natural, and expressive tone.

Key Narrative Techniques

• Narrative Perspectivism: The primary narrator is limited to transcribing a manuscript allegedly found, attributed to an Arab historian, Cide Hamete Benengeli. This is known as the "found manuscript" technique.
• Humor and Verisimilitude: This approach aims to increase the story's believability while simultaneously intensifying its humorous tone.
• Rich Literary Resources: The work is a compilation of various formal techniques and resources, prominently featuring irony, parody, and constant dialogue.

Don Quixote and the Modern Novel

The novel is considered a foundational text of Western literature, largely for its role in establishing the modern novel. Its key contributions include:

• Realism: The work creates a realistic universe, moving away from the idealization common in the literature of the time.
• The Unheroic Protagonist: Characters are depicted with both miseries and grandeur, reflecting the complexity of any real human being.
• Psychological Evolution: The characters are not static; they develop and are forged before the reader's eyes throughout the narrative.
• Individual vs. Society: The story explores the inherent conflict between an individual's desires and the constraints of reality and society.
• Internal Coherence: The plot masterfully integrates all narrative elements around the central figures, giving the work remarkable coherence and unity.
• Narrative Dialogue: The action progresses through dialogue, allowing characters to reveal their own personalities and perspectives as they speak.

The Transcendence of Don Quixote

Don Quixote is a major milestone in literary history due to its formal innovations, which laid the foundations for the modern novel. Its content masterfully explores the timeless conflict between the individual and society.

Characters

The vast array of characters offers a rich sample of Spanish society in the early 17th century.

• Don Quixote: A 50-year-old gentleman driven mad by reading chivalric novels. He represents the theme of the "sane madman," possessing moments of great lucidity amidst his delusions. He gradually becomes less mad, eventually restoring his sanity before his death.
• Sancho Panza: A humble, clumsy, yet loyal farmer who serves as Don Quixote's squire. He is sly and possesses a popular, proverb-based philosophy of life. He often corrects and counteracts his master's fantasies. Through their friendship, both characters evolve in a process known as quijotización (Sancho adopting Quixote's ideals) and sanchificación (Quixote adopting Sancho's pragmatism).