Chekhov’s Mistess

Is Don Quixote a Coward?

I like to think that Cervantes never wastes words, so when he tells a tale about characters besides Sancho and Quixote I assume he intended to add something to the overall story. I’m not sure what the link might have been with Marcela and Grisostomo, but with Cardenio and Luscinda, there was certainly a parallel – although I thought the parallel was with Cardenio and Sancho, with Luscinda filling the role of the woman who scorns her devoted lover.

When Sancho left Quixote for Toboso, our Ingenious Gentleman of La Mancha was left to conduct his penance, which he describes as “hell” [p. 198] and includes “…hit[ting] my head against rocks, along with other things of that nature” [p. 197]. But once he found himself alone, reflecting on the histories of Roland who went mad upon finding his love had been sleeping with a Moor, and Amadís of Gaul, who “finding himself scorned by his lady…withdrew to the Pena Pobre, in the company of a hermit, and there he had his fill of weeping and commending himself to God, until heaven hearkened his pleas in the midst of his greatest travail and need.”





Quixote reasons that his Dulcinea would never sleep with a Moor, so chooses Amadís’ lamentations over Roland’s madness: “why should I go to the trouble of tearing off all my clothes or causing grief to these trees, which have never done me any harm whatsoever?” And instead of his self-imposed “hell” Don Quixote is left with “sighs and verses” [p. 208].

At the same time Don Quixote is justifying his more moderate penance in private, his loyal friend Sancho has traveled back along the king’s highway and finds himself at dinner time in front of the inn where he was tossed humiliatingly in the air in a blanket. Afraid to go in, he is sitting outside when recognized by the priest and barber from Quixote’s home town, who know Sancho. In the course of the conversation, Sancho realizes he has forgotten a document promising him new donkeys:

“When Sancho saw that he could not find the book, his face turned deathly pale, and quickly patting down his entire body again, he saw again that he could not find it, and without further ado he put both hands to his beard and tore out half of it, and then, very quickly and without stopping, he punched himself half a dozen times on the face and nose until they were bathed in blood.”

It seems to me that Sancho’s penance is far greater than Quixote’s.

I also felt as though the story of Cardenio in some ways echoed the legends of Roland and Amadís of Gaul. Quixote only imagines his love’s scorn, and while Cardenio’s scorn is also imagined, it is far more real than Quixote’s. But Cardenio does go mad and seems quite committed to it until heaven hearkens his pleas.

So Quixote selects what he wants from the histories to justify his acts, or uses some other justification, such as when Sancho was being tossed at the inn and he couldn’t manage to overcome the obstacle of a wall to help his friend.

It’s easy to think of Don Quixote as some imperfectly human Falstaff*, but Falstaff’s owns his cowardice and Don Quixote does not, despite his outwardly noble claims.

I would love to hear anyone’s thoughts on this. Are there other areas of the book this opens up, like the idea of Quixote’s madness, which Mario Vargas Llosa says, according to Ana Maria,” Quixote’s madness should be taken metaphorically, not literally.





Agree? Disagree? Are there any examples otherwise?

Page references are to the hardback edition of the Grossman translation

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About this Post

• Posted by: Bud Parr
• Date: May 22, 2005
• Filed Under:
  Wise Men Fish Here: Literature

Tags: Don Quixote

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