World Masterpieces 271 Name:_________________

Don Quixote Writing Assignment

Choice 1:

Don Quixote has become a world figure not only as the hero of a celebrated novel but also as one of the main emblems of Spain.

Briefly discuss ways in which he can be compared, in his popularity and representativeness, to heroes of ancient epics on the one hand and to modern heroes of fiction, film, and comics on the other.

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Choice 2:

In the head note to Don Quixote, our text’s anthologists state that Don Quixote represents “one of the important aspects of Renaissance literature: the attempt, ultimately frustrated but extremely attractive as long as it lasts, of the individual mind to produce a vision and a system of its own in a world that often seems to have lost a universal frame of reference and a fully satisfactory sense of the value and meaning of action” (2220).

Explain how Don Quixote fits this observation.

Here's more help:

In Cervantes' time, the world was rapidly changing, with all sorts of new discoveries replacing older beliefs and assumptions. This made lots of folks nervous, and made them long for the “good old days” of established tradition and what they perceived to have been a much safer age. In short, these Renaissance folks lived, as do we, “in an era that seems to have lost a universal frame of reference.”

Along comes Cervantes who creates Don Quixote, a character who completely immerses himself in a world a long time gone and a world that had only existed in the imaginations of the romantically inclined. Don Quixote's world has fixed rules and a code of behavior the gives meaning to action.

And that was Don Quixote’s appeal—he gave people, both the reading audience and the character audience within the novel, at least for a brief bright moment, a trip in back time to that “safer world.”

Scientific exploration and discoveries have eroded, and continue to erode, that same “universal frame of reference,” so we today feel the very same angst as Renaissance people did, probably ten-fold. It’s a type of “free-floating” anxiety that humans will likely never get used to. We may be four hundred years removed from our Renaissance fellows, but we are still built with the same basic schematic.