Hallucinations

I think that the entire sequence when Don Quijote was lowered into the cave was all a figment of his imagination. I mean, its possible that he could be insane and hallucinating and saw all of that in a hallucination, but that doesnt really correspond to how I view the story. From the way I see it, Quijano is playing the character of Don Quijote, the chivalrous knight. As his journeys progress he is becoming more imaginative and better at the role he is playing. I think that he is just making up the entire story up as he goes. He has a large wealth of knowledge of how typical chivalrous stories go and then uses his own imagination to create the story. It is easy to argue whether Don Quijote is mad since he talks about things like this that are obviously not real to a common person. But, I think it is also easy to argue that he is just running with the role he is playing, he knows how to be a knight-errant in fiction. One thing that I picked up from the latest reading that I found interesting was the encounter with the cousin on the way to the cave. The cousin began to talk about how he writes about different sides of modern topics and modern books almost like a parody of those books, so it seemed to me. I found it interesting because Cervantes himself is writing a parody of chivalry books.

Lady Dulcinea

Since Don Quijote is role playing a knight-errant, his love for Dulcinea is part of the role play. He created her as part of his role play. Since Don Quijote takes interest to stories about love and ladies, he himself needs a love. His character focuses upon serving Lady Dulcinea and she is the reason for his knightly duties. In some of the chivalrous novels he had read the knights had their princesses that the knights honored and wed. In order to be the ideal knight that he dreams of he needs a princess. When it comes down to all the actions that he does he relates to Dulcinea. She is what makes his knight-errant character make sense and worthy. He could have used other ideals or objects for his reasoning. Such as the love for God and Christianity. He also could use his service to a particular monarch. Instead of telling defeated enemies to go pledge their allegiance to Dulcinea del Toboso he could have told them to go pledge the allegiance to the Church or to King so and so. But being a knight, Don Quijote must have a purpose for his doings. Perhaps he chooses to focus on love as opposed to the Church or Monarchy because it is more appealing to him in his readings. So when the character of Don Quijote was being created, it was based upon what the man behind the character has found most appealing in his readings of chivalrous knights.

Apocryphal

While flipping through Don Quijote today in class during discussion, I noticed something at the beginning of chapter five of part two. In the pre-text heading it uses the word apocryphal (I had to use the dictionary) when describing the chapter, because of the way Sancho speaks. Yesterday when doing research on Amadis de Gaul, I noticed the same thing was mentioned about the sixth book of the story, which was the first by an author other than Rodriguez. When I saw it in the novel today my mind was like "a-ha!" Because since much of my research has taught me that Don Quijote is a parody of many chivalry novels. Earlier in the novel there was another reference to Amadis when the priest and someone else that I'm forgetting were burning Don Quijote's novels. So I thought it was cool to have the word "apocryphal" appear to describe the chapter as a way to parody Amadis. It has also been interesting to see how Sancho Panza has changed from part one to part two. In part one Sancho had small dialogues and for the most part he was portrayed as not being very smart. However, right from the beginning of part two Sancho comes off as being much more smart, deep and goal-oriented than originally portrayed. Now he has extensive dialogues and the readers see more into his thoughts. In the first part he was more focused on gaining an island and questioning some of the crazy actions of his master, but yet eating up all of Don Quijote's reasoning.