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.