Don Quixote was a figure who walked a unique journey, torn between ideals and reality. What message does his story hold? In this article, we explore his life and the lessons it teaches.
You may have heard the phrase, “Why are you acting like Don Quixote?” It’s said to someone doing something utterly baffling and incomprehensible. It’s also said to those recklessly charging at things that are realistically impossible. The image of Don Quixote is precisely that of a half-mad man mistaking windmills for villainous giants and charging at them. To live a smooth life in the world, being called ‘normal,’ you must not resemble Don Quixote.
Cervantes’ novel Don Quixote is precisely a story centered on such a half-mad man. So, while reading the work, you can be surprised and amused by the protagonist Don Quixote’s absurd actions. Just read it for fun. You can even reassure yourself, ‘Thank goodness I wouldn’t do such crazy things.’ Yet, simply reading it and leaving it at that leaves something unsettled.
First, Cervantes stands as Spain’s greatest writer, whose name has reverberated across the world for centuries. His fame will never fade, no matter how much time passes. And that’s not all. Charles Dickens, Herman Melville, Fyodor Dostoevsky—great 19th-century writers we know well—have confessed to being influenced by Don Quixote. The list of 20th-century writers influenced by him is equally staggering: Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, Gabriel García Márquez. And that’s not all. *Don Quixote* inspired countless works across all art forms—theater, film, opera, ballet, musicals—giving birth to new creations. A novel that could be read lightly and enjoyably would never have inspired so many writers and artists.
Let’s return to the work itself. The protagonist, Don Quixote, is half-mad. This means he is not completely insane. Don Quixote, a Spanish country nobleman approaching his fifties, lived as a sane man at least until then. And even in the novel, where he appears to us as a half-mad man, he is normal in many ways. He is very intelligent, logical, and possesses sound judgment. He becomes mad in just one regard: the tales of chivalry. What drove him mad? Books. He reads books about chivalry and mistakes himself for the protagonist of those books. It’s not just a delusion. He tries to live out the life of the protagonist he read about. He tries to embody the spirit of chivalry he read about in the books. But why does that make him a madman? Why is he treated like a lunatic for trying to emulate the noble figures in chivalric novels?
When the world changes, people’s values inevitably change too. The era Don Quixote lived in was a time of transformation. We call that era the ‘Renaissance’. Renaissance means ‘rebirth’ in French. It signifies how completely the times had changed. Simply put, the worldview flipped from being God-centered to human-centered. In the works you’ve already read by Homer, Virgil, Dante, Boccaccio, and others, gods appear naturally. The gods controlled human destiny. The protagonists who led that era, living alongside the gods, were the knights. The value that people of that time universally held as paramount was the spirit of chivalry.
But the world changed dramatically. People began to think that our lives, visible right before our eyes, were more important than the unseen world where the gods dwelled. They began to believe that happiness in this present life, while alive, was more important than happiness in the afterlife after death. The knightly ideal of “regarding gold as stone” transformed into the gold-worshipping spirit of “worshipping gold like a god.” The world became one where practical gain mattered more than honor.
Even as the times changed, Don Quixote remained someone who still held the vanished spirit of chivalry as paramount. He was someone who still sought to realize that spirit. He is an anachronism. So, it’s no wonder others treat him like a madman. But then, is he truly mad?
『Don Quixote』was adapted into films and musicals in the 1960s and 1970s. Among these, the 1965 musical “Man of La Mancha” was a huge success, and a film was made based on that musical. I adore both that musical and the film. And I love the musical’s theme song, “The Impossible Dream,” so much that I still hum it occasionally. In that musical, Cervantes becomes Don Quixote himself. And he brilliantly transforms Don Quixote from a madman into someone who dreams the impossible. It masterfully shows that a madman isn’t truly mad, but someone who dreams the impossible. I want to add one more thing to that. That the person who dreams the impossible is precisely the progressive person who can change themselves and the world! This isn’t just some made-up story. Long ago, Confucius already said that the madman is a progressive person. Don Quixote isn’t an anachronistic person. He simply didn’t follow the times as they flowed by; he was someone who actively and proactively tried to realize the values he believed were important.
If you didn’t simply dismiss Don Quixote’s mad actions as mere entertainment but felt a touch of sadness, that’s a success. If you felt affection for him beyond that sadness, that’s an even greater success. You’ve felt something akin to what the great writers inspired by 『Don Quixote』 felt, so you can take pride in that.
You, reading this book, might just be doing something like Don Quixote. In a world where many say, “What good does reading books do anyway?” or “Isn’t reading novels just a waste of time?”, you are reading a novel. What else could you be but Don Quixote? If you face such finger-pointing, say this:
“I cannot live without dreams. I dream of changing myself and the world. I dream of making myself and the world beautiful.”
Miguel de Cervantes, author of 『Don Quixote』, was born on September 29, 1547, in Alcalá de Henares, near Madrid, the capital of Spain. His father was a doctor of noble birth, but financially incompetent. By 1551, he had lost all his property to debt collectors and was even imprisoned. After that, the family moved around various regions, including Valladolid and Seville, yet their circumstances never improved.
Cervantes did not initially aspire to be a writer. His first profession was soldier. Enlisting at age 22, Cervantes served in the Spanish forces stationed in Venice, Italy. While serving, he was wounded in the left hand during the famous Battle of Lepanto against the Ottoman Empire, yet he continued his military career until age 28. In 1575, at the age of 28, Cervantes finally decided to retire and set sail for his homeland, Spain. However, just six days into the voyage, the ship he was on was attacked by pirates. Cervantes suddenly found himself a pirate captive, taken to Algiers. The pirates demanded a ransom from Cervantes’ family.
The ransom demanded was an enormous sum the impoverished Cervantes family could never possibly raise. With no hope for outside help, Cervantes attempted to escape. But his four escape attempts all ended in failure, and each time he had to endure harsh punishment. Taking pity on him, fellow Spaniards in Algeria paid the ransom on his behalf. Thanks to this, Cervantes ended his five years of captivity and finally returned to Spain in 1580. In 1584, at the age of 37, he married Catalina de Salazar, who was 19.
Cervantes attempted to enter public service but was repeatedly frustrated. Facing dire straits, he drew upon his youthful literary skills to write and sell poetry, plays, and novels. His first novel, Galatea, published in 1585, received favorable reviews but did not bring him great fame. After immense hardship, Cervantes finally secured a low-level government post and served as a civil servant for over a decade. During his tenure, he was imprisoned multiple times on unjust corruption charges. It was during this time, in the autumn of 1597—the year he turned 50—that he conceived the idea for Don Quixote while incarcerated. The musical “Man of La Mancha” synthesizes Cervantes’ actual biography with his work Don Quixote.
Published in 1605 when Cervantes was 57, Don Quixote achieved tremendous success. However, due to financial hardship, he had sold the publishing rights to the publisher and thus gained no economic benefit. In his later years, he devoted himself to religious life and entered a monastery. Even then, he continued writing, publishing works such as Exemplary Novels (1613) and the second part of Don Quixote (1615) in quick succession. Finally, around the time he formally took his vows as a friar, his dropsy worsened, and he ultimately faced his deathbed. On April 23, 1616, Cervantes died at the age of 69. Interestingly, that very same day, another great writer of the era, Shakespeare, also passed away.
