Don Quixote (Plot Summary)

Plot Summary

Part I

Don Quixote opens with a prologue. Much of the prologue, however, is devoted to a discussion of what a prologue should include, offering the reader some insight into what a seventeenth-century audience might expect.

Don Quixote is the story of Alonso Quijano, an aging gentleman of La Mancha. He reads so many chivalric romances that he loses his sanity. As the narrator reports: "With virtually no sleep and so much reading, he dried out his brain and lost his sanity."

Don Quixote decides to become a knight-errant, which is a knight who travels the countryside performing good deeds and seeking adventure. He puts on an old suit of armor, mounts a bony old horse he calls Rocinante, and renames himself Don Quixote de La Mancha. He also appoints a peasant woman, Aldonza Lorenzo, as his ladylove, and renames her Dulcinea del Toboso. Like the knights of old, Don Quixote performs good deeds in the name of Dulcinea, although she does not know that she is the object of the older man's attention.

Don Quixote then rides in search of adventure. Just as he considers himself a knight, he imagines that a local inn is a castle and the innkeeper a castellan. As a result of his madness and odd behavior, a group of travelers beat him.

After the beating, he makes his way home, where he is interrogated by the local priest and barber. Concerned, they decide to cure him of his madness by burning his books. Don Quixote attributes the missing books to a thieving wizard.

Soon he sets off on another adventure, this time accompanied by Sancho Panza, a rude peasant. In a very famous scene, Don Quixote mistakes some windmills for giants and rushes at them with his spear. When Don Quixote realizes that he has attacked a windmill, he says that the same magician who has stolen his books has also turned the giants into windmills.

Don Quixote and Sancho have several more adventures, including mistaking two herds of sheep for armies and a funeral for a parade of monsters. Furthermore, they free some prisoners on their way to becoming galley slaves. Don Quixote travels to the mountains to fast and pray for his love, Dulcinea, and sends Sancho Panza with a message to Dulcinea. Don Quixote's friends intercept Sancho and learn his master's whereabouts. They finally lure Don Quixote home, hoping that they can keep him safe.

Part II

Don Quixote's friends are unable to keep him at home for long. Don Quixote and Sancho Panza take off in search of adventure again, this time meeting with the Knight of the Wood (a village student in disguise who had promised to impede Don Quixote's adventures), joining a wedding party, and destroying a traveling puppet show.

The second volume of the novel also includes a long section in which Don Quixote and Sancho Panza stay with a duke and a duchess who have read about the pair's famous adventures. The Duke and the Duchess play a series of tricks on Don Quixote, including the "disenchantment" of Dulcinea and the enthronement of Sancho as ruler of an island.

Next, Don Quixote and Sancho decide to go to Barcelona where they have additional adventures. Finally, the student firm the earlier episode finds Don Quixote and challenges him to combat. Don Quixote is defeated. He decides to return home and become a shepherd.

On his return home, Don Quixote falls ill. He instructs his niece and housekeeper, "Take me to my bed because I don't feel at all well, and just remember: whether I'm a knight errant, as now, or a shepherd, later on, I'll never stop doing for you whatever needs to be done, as you will see in the event."

Although his friends try to cheer him up, Don Quixote grows weaker and weaker. Finally he writes his will and apparently returns to sanity:

I was mad, and now am sane; I was Don Quixote de La Mancha and now, as I have said, I am Alonso Quijano the Good. I pray that my repentance, and my honesty, may return me to the good opinion your graces once held of me.

With this renunciation of chivalry and romance, Don Quixote receives his last rites and subsequently dies. He leaves an inheritance to both Sancho and to his niece, instructing her to marry a man who has never read a book of chivalry.