Don Quixote by Cervantes Was Never About Madness

The Book Brief Project · May 3, 2026 · 10m

Don Quixote begins with an aging man in La Mancha who reads so many stories of knights and chivalry that he decides to become one himself. What starts as comedy gradually becomes something stranger: a novel about what happens when the identity you choose collides with the one the world insists you have.Miguel de Cervantes follows Don Quixote and his companion Sancho Panza through a landscape where windmills become giants, inns become castles and ordinary encounters are transformed by imagination. But the joke changes as the novel goes on. Sancho begins to care about the man behind the…