Dreams to Legacy

[Texas Mom]

Early in the novel I thought there was an actual girl that Don Quixote imagined to be Dulcinea. I was hoping that he would meet up with her before the end. I was curious as to what would transpire should that have happended. I would have liked an epilogue to find out what happened to Sanchez in the years following Don Quixoti’s death.

I had to read commentary before I noticed that he hung on to life as long as he had the energy to rationalize failures and thus hang on to his delusion. His agreement to sit out for a year seemed to be the catalyst that brought on his sanity. With sanity came destroyed dream, and destroyed dream, death. If the world wouldn’t humor him, he would leave it. The Duke and Duchess, in pursuing their own entertainment, had a significant role in keeping him alive; the student, disguised as a knight, taking on the same role Don Quixote did, caused him to leave his dream, ultimately encounter reality and begin his decline into death. Is this making a statement on academics v.s. fantasy based-entertainment? Does fantasy-entertainment have a role in our keeping our dreams alive and motivate us to continue pursuing them even if our reality is far from our dreams? Even if we don’t fully realize our dreams in our lifetime, perhaps we have a role in furthering along a collective dream that others take up where we left off and carry even further; perhaps we are link in a chain of a larger dream and our legacy is to complete our own link.

[lavendar1]

Is this making a statement on academics v.s. fantasy based-entertainment? Does fantasy-entertainment have a role in our keeping our dreams alive and motivate us to continue pursuing them even if our reality is far from our dreams? Even if we don’t fully realize our dreams in our lifetime, perhaps we have a role in furthering along a collective dream that others take up where we left off and carry even further; perhaps we are link in a chain of a larger dream and our legacy is to complete our own link.

What an interesting thought! I have long believed that a bit of delusion is required to deal with reality and to motivate us to create our own life stories. Whether we extract our delusions from literature, entertainment, or in response to a personal reality that doesn't match up to our expectations, they fill a void and require us to act; Quixote's delusion was his reality - and it was a quest for the noblest of causes - one many of us strive to further (to borrow your words) - in a collective dream...

[Ariel Figue]

What makes you think Quixote was "delusional?"

He's an invented character--<i>self-invented</i> in Book 2. To make him represent some form of real world mental condition reduces the book to the level of a TV sitcom.

A better question would be: what is it he inventing, and how does this stand in relation to the other characters, and to SP, who mediates between Q's invented self and those characters who will not be assimilated into his world (as he refuses to be assimilated into theirs)?

To begin to answer that, you have to take into consideration the development of Cervantes' literary idea. What begins as parody, mocking the romantic genre and the characters cited by Q, turns into something more difficult to pin down, and far more strange.

Does DQ qualify as "metafiction?" In contrast to the romances, which are meant to be taken seriously, DQ raises the level of absurdity--defying the readers wish to simply "believe," or make believe he believes in what's happening. You cannot forget you are reading an invention, a work of literature. Interpreting Q as "delusional" is a radical misreading--burdening the narrative with the task of showing us something we think of as "realistic." That is--rather than granting the book the right to challenge our hand-me-down assumptions of "reality"---making it conform to (and confirm) them. We ask--what would make someone act like Q in the real world as we believe it to be? He would have to be crazy! Delusional.

But we can't assume the fictive universe of this book conforms to our assumptions, can we? That begs the question... the problem of understanding what that world is, the ways it is radically "other," defying our received notions, as the character Don Quixote defies the characters who seek to tame and assimilate him to their world.