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Part 1, Chapter 6
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Don Quixote, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Truth and Lies
Literature, Realism, and Idealism
Madness and Sanity
Intention and Consequence
Self-Invention, Class Identity, and Social Change
Summary
Analysis
Soon, Don Quixote begins to shout, leaps out of bed and charges here and there with his sword, thinking that he is a fictional knight called Reynald of Montalbán. He falls asleep again and the housekeeper burns all the condemned books. The priest and the barber decide to wall off the room that had held the chivalry books and to tell Don Quixote that it was all an enchanter’s doing. When Don Quixote gets out of bed two days later and finds his library missing, the women tell him just that. Quixote decides that a famous enchanter wishes him ill.
Theoretically, the priest, the barber, the niece, and the housekeeper conspire to cure Quixote’s madness and retrieve him into a world of simple truth, peace, and common sense. Yet they make use of destruction and deceit. Though the four friends say their only aim is Quixote’s well-being, their behavior is full of hostility – the subconscious hostility of people fighting for their version of reality.
Themes
Don Quixote spends the next twelve days talking to his friends the priest and the barber and convincing a neighbor of his, a farmer called Sancho Panza, to go adventuring with him as his squire. He tells Sancho that very likely he will soon make him governor of an island, as a result of one adventure or another. He gathers money and provisions in preparation for his second sally. They ride out at night without saying goodbye to friends and relatives.
If Quixote were to say to his four well-wishers that he will soon give them islands, they would consider the promise absurd and impossible. Sancho Panza is a little more malleable in his ideas: his sense of the world is not quite as fixed. He can imagine a world where he receives a present of an island, and he decides to believe in it.
Themes
