Well, this is why I got into this mess in the first place: to read the giants of western literature. And no matter who you are, there is little doubt that Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote is a qualifying entry. Four-hundred years old, and inspiring more art and interpretations than any single work I know of, this is a book to be handled with due reverence. Despite the age and the shadow it casts, however, the first handful of pages contains much for a 21st century reader to consider.
Right from the "Preface to the Reader," Cervantes makes no effort to hide the fact that his book is going to "ridicule the absurdity of those books of chivalry." His approach, though, is somewhat tongue in cheek, and really pretty sophisticated for the 15th century. Rather than a simple bashing of medieval romances, the reader is presented with Don Quixote, "the most virtuous and valiant knight who had appeared for many years." Quixote, of course, is nothing of the kind, but Cervantes as narrator tells the story as though his hero's madness were perfectly reasonable in a chivalric knight, and therein may lie his harshest critique.
More than anything, Don Quixote seems less like a comic figure than he does a tragic one. In the countless manifestations of the character I've run into over the years, he has always come off as a bit of a loony. What strikes me as sad is the isolation which seems to have driven him to his outlandish ways. Cervantes tells the reader that Quixote (whose real name is Quixada) spent all his leisure time reading chivalric tales. A man of landed wealth, he has no friends, no other occupations to fill up his time but reading. As much as I love books, his life seems to have an unwritten loneliness in it before he sets off as a knight-errant. In his seclusion, I don't think it is a far leap to read our man of la Mancha in a modern context.
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