This slim book contains a set of three lectures Van Doren delivered at Emory University in 1956. In a wry and genial manner, Van Doren makes the case that Don Quixote is one of the greatest books ever written.
Of the Don, Van Doren claims, “He is that rare thing in literature, a completely created character. He is so real that we cannot be sure we understand him.” Even someone who hasn’t read the book, but seen illustrations, knows Cervantes has paired him with an unlikely squire, Sancho Panza, hardly less memorable than the Don. Van Doren shows how the relationship evolves from master and servant to two friends who love each other.
Van Doren argues, based on Don Quixote’s moments of lucidity and the sagacity of his speeches, that, contrary to the repeated assertion in the book that he is mad, he is, on the contrary, aware of what he is doing. In this reading, the Don’s knight-errantry was a hoax meant to entertain and edify the world. When Don Quixote saw that he’d failed in this, he abandoned the hoax (473).
Similarly, Cervantes misdirects us about Sancho Panza. He is illiterate and seems to have only his next meal and a good night’s sleep in mind. Yet when given a chance to govern a town, he displays a native insight into human nature, to the astonishment of those around him, watching for him to fail.
Van Doren characterizes Don Quixote as two interconnected series: adventures and conversations. It is the adventures that stick in the popular imagination. Van Doren asserts, however, that more is “lost by ignoring the speaker” than the deeds.
Van Doren concludes that Don Quixote “is the most perfect knight that ever lived; the only one, in fact, we can believe.” Rather than achieving his avowed aim of destroying the literature of knight-errantry through satire, Cervantes has saved it. He produced “the one treatment of the subject that can be read forever.” ( )