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Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, sketched by Pablo Picasso

"En un lugar de la Mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme, no ha mucho tiempo que vivía un hidalgo de los de lanza en astillero, adarga antigua, rocín flaco y galgo corredor."

"In a place in La Mancha, the name of which I don't want to recall, there lived, not long ago, one of those gentlemen with a lance on the rack, an old shield, a worn-out horse, and a racing greyhound."

These are the very first lines of The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha ("El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha" in the original Spanish), often shortened to just Don Quixote. The novel was written by Spanish writer and satirist Miguel de Cervantes. Cervantes wrote the story in two parts, the first part published in 1605 and the second in 1615.

The story is that of an old hidalgo named Alonso Quijano, who is so obsessed with chivalric novels that he's lost a few screws and decided that he is a vagrant knight. Quijano renames himself as "Don Quixote de La Mancha" and decides to win eternal fame through the besting of criminals and general upholding of the Chivalric Code. Unfortunately for a lot of innocent people, his delusions make him pick fights with innocent bystanders, some of whom do not fight back because Don Quixote is obviously crazy. Of course, there are also strangers who are not so sympathetic. After one delivers a brutal beating to Don Quixote, a neighbor from his village meets the wounded Don Quixote and takes him home, where his friends and family burn the cursed books of chivalry and claim that A Wizard Did It (literally) to try to cure him. However, he soon returns to his delusion and journey. This time he manages to convince a simple farm-hand, Sancho Panza, to become his squire and sidekick for the promise of a governorship in the future. They experience many adventures, including the famous one; where Don Quixote attacks some windmills thinking they are ferocious giants. note  At the end of the book, Don Quixote's friends trick him by making him believe he is enchanted and take him back to his village.

Throughout the novel, Don Quixote never doubts, even for a moment, that the fictional adventures that he has read are real and that he really is a knight errant. Not even the petitions of his loved ones, the continuous ridicule of his peers, or the brutal beatings he suffers make him break his resolution: Don Quixote always continues trying to impose his quixotic (literally; he's the word's origin) beliefs on the world.

The first part of the novel was published in 1605, when stories of chivalry were pushing Condemned by History and Don Quixote's dreams of reviving chivalric ways were really a strange, misbegotten idea. However, Miguel de Cervantes had a clear distaste for them, in no small part because he was an ex-soldier who lost the mobility of his left arm in the Battle of Lepantonote  and spent several years in prison. Having experienced the harshness of war, he found these romantic stories to be ridiculous and disconnected from reality. And out of such distaste, he decided to write this story to pick them apart and openly mock them.

The novel became a popular success (although that success was nothing unheard of compared to other contemporary titles, and it certainly wasn't a hit with Spanish critics of the day), and was reprinted several times in the next decade, even being translated into French and English. But most notable was the change in Spanish popular culture. Within a few months of its printing, virtually all of Spain knew about Don Quixote's exploits: Memetic Mutations arose, chivalric romances became popular again, and even apocryphal "continuations" appeared. In the novel, Don Quixote mocks the tropes and cliches of these stories, yet leads an ironic revival of their traditions through his good nature and willingness to go challenge society's beliefs. Cervantes' story achieved the same thing in reality as in the story, while at the same time reinventing literature by creating the novel in its modern form.

Cervantes had promised a sequel at the end of Volume I and had begun writing it when he caught word of a spurious fake sequel to Don Quixote, written by an unknown writer with the pseudonym Avellaneda as a cash grab. This caused him to denounce the book in his own pages (somewhat ironically, this is the main reason anyone even remembers the imitator at all today) and motivated him to put out Vol II, the hidalgo's final adventure. The second part has a more serious tone, taking advantage of the change brought about by the first part of the book in Real Life, where Don Quixote has evolved from a Lord Error-Prone to an honest (but still insane) man whose noble attitude and delusions makes him the Butt-Monkey of a lot of people. Don Quixote has to confront his delusions (but only in the very last chapter), and the harshness of reality makes him realize that his naïve dreams were shallow, which brings him back to sanity before his death.

Don Quixote has been adapted to every medium, including illustrations by Gustave Doré. It's also been made into a couple of animated adaptations (one of them with Funny Animals) and even a Musical.

Don Quijote is commonly cited in literary criticism as "the first modern novel", and is probably among the most influential books of all time (just take a look at The Other Wiki's list). It's also widely considered to be the best book ever written in the Spanish language, and nowadays almost every Spanish-speaking kid will have to read and study it in school at one point or another, similar to how every kid in the USA and UK must read and study Shakespeare (Cervantes' close contemporary).

The star Mu Arae is now named for Cervantes, and the planets (in increasing order of distance) are Dulcinea, Rocinante, Quijote, and Sancho.

Trope Namer for Windmill Crusader and The Dulcinea Effect.

For a list of adaptations and works inspired by the novel, see here.


Tropes found in Don Quixote:

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  • Achilles in His Tent: Parodied when Don Quixote invokes this trope for no other reason that a lot of other Knights (Amadis of Gaul, Beltenebros, and Orlando) did it. At the Sierra Morena forest, Don Quixote sends Sancho with a letter to Dulcinea (his imaginary love interest) explaining to her that he will be in the forest until she forgives him... Even when Don Quixote has not made anything against her. This madness will force the Curate and the Barber to ask Dorotea to pretend to be a princess and ask Don Quixote a favour to get him out of the forest.
    "It seems to me," said Sancho, "that the knights who behaved in this way had provocation and cause for those follies and penances; but what cause has your worship for going mad? What lady has rejected you, or what evidence have you found to prove that the lady Dulcinea del Toboso has been trifling with Moor or Christian?"
    "There is the point," replied Don Quixote, "and that is the beauty of this business of mine; no thanks to a knight-errant for going mad when he has cause; the thing is to turn crazy without any provocation, and let my lady know, if I do this in the dry, what I would do in the moist"
  • Antiquated Linguistics:
    • In the original Spanish book, at least, Don Quijote uses outdated forms of speech and pronunciation, like maintaining the initial 'f' in words like 'fermosa' (hermosa), in an attempt to emulate the outdated forms of speech used on chivalry novels. This shows up in some translations as a Woolseyism: Don Quixote simply uses more archaic vocabulary than everyone else around.
    • Really toned down in the second part, so it appears that the Spanish language was modernized in 10 years, or for the people missing the joke (because they don't know if words like 'fermosa' were used back in the 1600s) thinking it's a more up to date transcription.
    • The very name of the book itself. The 'x' in the name denotes an antiquated ortography for a very strong "h" phonem (similar as Scottish loch) and not 'eks'. It is written in Modern Spanish as 'j'. Thus don Quijote, (ki-ho-tey) not Quixote (quick-sot). The Spanish edition uses the modern ortography, Don Quijote.
    • A special mention deserves the Spanish word insula, Gratuitous Latin that means island or place limited and isolated, the Standard Hero Reward Don Quixote has promised to Sancho. Sancho keeps using that word even when he doesn't know what it is.
  • Affectionate Parody: Cervantes was a connoisseur of chivalry novels (evidenced by the famous scene where the priest and the barber go into a lengthy discussion of Don Quixote's library), and his parody of the genre isn't as vicious and destructive as commonly thought.
  • The Alleged Steed: Rocinante is a broken-down nag; so much so that his name is synonymous with busted old nags in Spain.
  • Animated Adaptation:
    • "Don Coyote & Sancho Panda"
    • Burbank Films Australia adapted this story.
    • An earlier example (1979), without Talking Animals.
    • And a hilarious anime adaptation, too: Zukkoke Knight Don de la Mancha.
    • Mr. Magoo also had a cartoon where he played the titular knight. There has never been more perfect casting.
    • The Disney film Bolt is arguably a retelling of this story with Bolt in the place of Don Quixote, Rhino filling the role of Sancho Panza, Penny playing Dulcinea, Mittens standing in for Cordonza, and the hamsterball is Rocinante. The windmill is the television show Bolt but there is a real windmill too.
    • The 2007 computer-animated film Donkey Xote is an In Name Only adaptation told from the point of view of Sancho Panza's donkey Rucio, best known for how it blatantly rips off Shrek: The donkey is clearly modeled after Shrek's Donkey, and the advertising even presented it as "From producers who saw Shrek."
  • Arcadia:
    • Don Quixote considers becoming a shepherd instead of a knight at the end. Foreshadowed by the Golden Age speech he gives to the shepherds in the book's beginning; pastoral tropes in general are very important in the novel for deconstruction and parody. The real shepherds are Country Mouse-ish ignorant people who have enough common sense and work as shepherds by need. They want to help and are sympathetic enough. The problem comes when a lot of City Mouse types try to invoke this trope:
    • At the Sierra Morena, Don Quixote converses this trope with the goatherds at Chapter XXI, delivering an Author Filibuster, "Discourse on the Golden Age", comparing the goatherds with Noble Savages. None of them understand a word. One of the goatherds sings a song, but he didn’t compose it (because he doesn’t know how); it was his uncle who composed it, a cleric who has studied.
      All this long harangue (which might very well have been spared) our knight delivered because the acorns they gave him reminded him of the golden age; and the whim seized him to address all this unnecessary argument to the goatherds, who listened to him gaping in amazement without saying a word in reply.
    • In any Arcadia poem, one of the various shepherds complains about the shepherdess that ignores him. Marcela and Grisostomo deconstruct this at chapter XII – XIV, where the Shepherdess Ice Queen claims she is So Beautiful, It's a Curse and so she had to be a shepherdess only to get her freedom, but all the city mice that courted her decided to be shepherds too. She states plainly that just because you are attracted to someone doesn't mean that you are entitled to that person's affections or that they are obligated to love you back, and if someone's rejection of your advances is so very torturous, then the onus is on you to get over them and move on, not to continue chasing after them when they've already made it clear that they want nothing to do with you. If you continue to do so, the only one who is being cruel to you is yourself, not the object of your affections for merely existing and asserting their basic right to not have to be with anyone they don't love. Thus, if Grisóstomo killed himself, it is unjust to blame her.
    • Deconstructed again at chapter LII from the first part, in which Eugenio tells the story of the beautiful Leandra, who elopes with a soldier that left her. Leandra gets Locked Away in a Monastery while her various City Mouse admirers decided to become shepherds and make poems about how Leandra betrayed them... even when she never gave them any hope. Eugenio tells that all those shepherds curse Leandra’s indiscretion, and they seem so unhappy that he lampshades that Arcadia is really a living hell. Eugenio then says he has decided to follow the easier way, claim All Women Are Lustful and become a Politically Incorrect Hero who hates all women.
    • Parodied in Chapter LVIII of the Second Part: Don Quixote meets some beautiful shepherdesses who are part of a crew of noble and rich people who invoke this trope by retiring to a forest to play at being shepherds and shepherdesses. They are so sophisticated that they have studied two poems from Garcilaso de la Vega (in Spanish) and Camoes (in Portuguese). Only the truly rich city mouse can afford to live in a happy Arcadia.
    • Don Quixote considers becoming a shepherd instead of a knight at the end of the second part; before he can invoke this trope, his housekeeper tries to dissuade him by lampshading the truth:
      "Will your worship be able to bear, out in the fields, the heats of summer, and the chills of winter, and the howling of the wolves? Not you; for that's a life and a business for hardy men, bred and seasoned to such work almost from the time they were in swaddling-clothes. Why, to make choice of evils, it's better to be a knight-errant than a shepherd!"
  • Ascended Fanboy: Quixote decides to become a knight errant after years of reading chivalry books; though in this case he takes a more proactive approach than most.
  • Author Avatar:
    • Cervantes dedicates some chapters of the first part of the novel to "The Story of the Captive Captain", Ruy Pérez de Viedma, a Spanish captain who was prisoner of the Moors. Curiously, this man, like the Priest, claims to know some guy called "de Saavedra".
    • The priest that selects books to be burned also functions as an author avatar, reflecting Cervantes' opinions of contemporary romance authors. A few of the books he praises are written by two of Cervantes' real life friends, and he also includes one of his own works.
  • Author Filibuster: Parodied and lampshaded. The critics have said that the chivalry books were plagued by a lot of lengthy discourses from different abstract themes, immobilizing the action and discouraging the reader. Cervantes lampshaded this when Don Quixote talks for nearly two pages in the Discourse on the Golden Age, Part I, Chapter XI: "All this long harangue (which might very well have been spared)" and satirized it when in the Discourse on Arms and Letters, Part I, Chapter XXXVIII, the action really never stops, because all the other characters eat their dinners while Don Quixote talks: "All this lengthy discourse Don Quixote delivered while the others supped, forgetting to raise a morsel to his lips, though Sancho more than once told him to eat his supper, as he would have time enough afterwards to say all he wanted."
  • Beam Me Up, Scotty!: Invoked and lampshaded: In the Preface of the Author, Part I, Cervantes's friend mentions a quote in Latin that a lot of people attributed to Horace, but Cervantes's friend really has done the research, so he mentions "or whoever said it."
  • Beleaguered Assistant: Sancho Panza has to deal with the consequences of his boss' antics constantly. There's a reason why he's mostly known for giving Hurricanes of Aphorisms.
  • Bilingual Bonus: Quijote means "cuisse", thigh armour, in Spanish.
  • Bittersweet Ending: Don Quixote, after a string of betrayals and especially cruel practical jokes, regains his sanity and negates chivalry just before his death, while his squire has ingrained the chivalry lifestyle so deeply that he practically cries for Don Quixote to come back to the adventure.
  • Blunt Metaphors Trauma: Subverted with the Biscayan, who is another of the many Victimized Bystanders Don Quixote finds in his adventures. He talks exclusively in this fashion when he engages with Don Quixote in a duel to the death, even when Don Quixote understands him perfectly:
    One of the squires in attendance upon the coach, a Biscayan, was listening to all Don Quixote was saying, and, perceiving that he would not allow the coach to go on, but was saying it must return at once to El Toboso, he made at him, and seizing his lance addressed him in bad Castilian and worse Biscayan after his fashion, "Begone, caballero, and ill go with thee; by the God that made me, unless thou quittest coach, slayest thee as art here a Biscayan."
    Don Quixote understood him quite well, and answered him very quietly, "If thou wert a knight, as thou art none, I should have already chastised thy folly and rashness, miserable creature." To which the Biscayan returned, "I no gentleman!—I swear to God thou liest as I am Christian: if thou droppest lance and drawest sword, soon shalt thou see thou art carrying water to the cat: Biscayan on land, hidalgo at sea, hidalgo at the devil, and look, if thou sayest otherwise thou liest."
  • Book Burning: A subversion of this trope given that books then were new media: Don Quixote's niece and Old Retainer asked the Moral Guardians' permission to do the book burning in a desperate attempt to cure him. The moral guardians are the most educated people in the village (a curate and a barber), they never wanted to impose their ideas and are doing this as a favor to the family, so they don't care much for this book burning. And a lot of those are really badly written books that destroyed Don Quixote's mind, and the good books were stolen by the moral guardians.
  • Bookends: At chapter I of the first part, Don Quixote spends four days thinking how to give his horse a new name, and another eight days how to rename himself, showing us that he is a Mad Dreamer. At the penultimate chapter of the second part, Don Quixote immediately thinks of the names he and his partners will adopt as shepherds, and Sanson Carrasco even says some names in a careless manner. Don Quixote laughed at the adaptation of the name, showing us that he now is Bored with Insanity.
  • Bored with Insanity: In the last chapter of Don Quixote, a poster boy for Fandumb of Chivalric Romance, his Fan Disillusionment is so great that he comes back to his senses.
    "I was mad, now I am in my senses; I was Don Quixote of La Mancha, I am now, as I said, Alonso Quixano the Good."
  • Born in the Wrong Century: Surprisingly, played straight and lampshaded, not because Don Quixote wants to be a Knight in Shining Armor (Don Quixote wanted to revive a past that really never was, a past with good and bad wizards, fierce giants, fabulous monsters, imaginary reigns, incredible dresses, poisonous snakes, terrible battles, incredible encounters, lovesick princess, funny dwarfs, squires made counts, and a lot of outrageous adventures), but because he is an Hidalgo (noble). Alonso Quijano lives in the wrong century and is lampshaded in the famous Discourse on Arms and Letters, Part I, Chapter 38. Cervantes' genius let him realize that technological advances like gunpowder and artillery demanded the end of the cavalry and the initiation of new strategies and organizational forms in the armies, as well as a redefinition of the role of nobility in a society where individual courage and skill are useless, and the organization of nameless masses of soldiers (infantry) becomes important. With Don Quijote, Cervantes is saying that for him, and for all the nobility (rich or poor) they were born in the wrong century, and they must reform or die. Though with the rise of video games and such, you could make a case for Don Quixote being, unbeknownst even to the author, born too early.
  • Butt-Monkey: Poor Sancho. Don Quixote himself is also quite put-upon, but whatever happens to him tends to be that much worse for Sancho.
  • Cannot Tell Fiction from Reality: Don Quixote suffers from this. This tendency was what led him to become a knight errant from reading cavalry books in the first place, and that's just the start.
  • Canon Immigrant: In a way, Álvaro Tarfe may be one of the first examples, if not the first. He is a character from the non canon sequel written by Avellaneda, who appears at the end of the legitimate second part of the Quijote, the one written by Cervantes, talking to the real Don Quijote and Sancho.
  • Central Theme: Each book you can say has two themes related to the power of fantasy and the clash of chivalry with the real world, pulling in effect a Decon-Recon Switch:
    • Part I — The Golden Age of chivalry is not only dead but never existed outside the pages of a book. Real-Life doesn't have noble knights, damsels in distress and plucky common folk in need of saving, but people doing what it takes to survive in an unfair society. Someone who tries to be a Knight in the real-world has to be crazy since anyone with a sense of reality would know it's impossible.
    • Part II — Our fictions affect our perceptions of reality, yet at the same time, fiction and storytelling can inspire and change reality. Anyone who becomes a Self-Proclaimed Knight from reading books of chivalry is crazy, but trying to live up to this obsolete code of chivalry in the hard real world despite repeated failures is way more heroic than any fictional knight could ever be.
  • Character Witness: Hilariously subverted by Andres and Tosilos, who come back not to help, but to denounce Don Quixote.
    • Andres, a boy that Don Quixote thinks has rescued at chapter IV part I shows up again at Chapter XXXI part I. Don Quixote wants him to defend his Chivalric Romance delusions, but instead Andres denounces him with a Nice Job Breaking It, Hero.
    • Lacquey Tosilos appears at chapter LVI of the second part when Don Quixote is trying to help the helpless, and comes back in chapter LXVII to inform Don Quixote that all was a "Shaggy Dog" Story.
  • Chuck Cunningham Syndrome: Played perfectly straight: In Chapter I, Part I, Cervantes mentions the people who lived in Don Quixote's house: his niece, his housekeeper and a lad who helps them with the field and the marketplace... this last of whom we'll never see or hear of again. Obviously, Cervantes had completely forgotten about this character, and didn't want to write him even in the Second Part of the novel; but in his defense, one of Don Quixote’s themes is about how silly it is to detect errors of continuity in a silly fictional tale.
  • Chuunibyou: Don Quixote can be considered the Ur-Example of this trope in fiction. Despite being almost 50 years old, he still more or less qualifies, becoming obsessed with novels about Chivalric Romance and deluding himself into believing he's a knight who goes on all kinds of fantastical adventures when he's really just making a nuisance of himself to whoever he meets.
  • Civil War: Don Quixote travels to Barcelona, a Spanish province that is in a civil war in The Cavalier Years.
  • Cliffhanger: Parodied by the end of Part I, chapter 8: that chapter ends with a dramatic description of Don Quixote and a poor innocent bystander charging at each other... only to have the next chapter start with the narrator telling us that he doesn't have the page in the original manuscript that describes the fight, and wasting three pages telling us how he could get the next part. The critics have said that the cliffhanger was a regular resource of the chivalry books.
  • Cloudcuckoolander: There is nothing else to call a man who attacks windmills like Don Quixote.
  • Combat Pragmatist: Bernardo del Carpio is one of Alonso Quixano's favorite knights, because he found the way to defeat Roland the Enchanted: instead of attacking him with a sword, Bernardo just strangled him.
  • Complaining About Shows You Don't Watch: In-universe with Don Quixote: At Part II Chapter LIX, When Don Quixote hears someone talking how he is not more in love with Dulcinea del Toboso, he is full of wrath and indignation. So he read only a few pages of Avellaneda's Fanfic about him. After a discussion of how this Continuation Fic is full of Character Derailment for Don Quixote and Sancho, Don Quixote believes that the book is bad and not worthy of his time or effort:
    ... though Don Juan wished Don Quixote to read more of the book to see what it was all about, he was not to be prevailed upon, saying that he treated it as read and pronounced it utterly silly; and, if by any chance it should come to its author's ears that he had it in his hand, he did not want him to flatter himself with the idea that he had read it; for our thoughts, and still more our eyes, should keep themselves aloof from what is obscene and filthy.
  • Concepts Are Cheap: Deconstructed in-universe: In the first part of the novel, Don Quixote wants to be an Knight Errant For Great Justice. In the second part of the novel, his motivation changes For Happiness. But this time Don Quixote is an honest man that must admit at the end of the novel that his efforts didn’t help anyone and his Chivalric Romance dreams were shallow.
  • Contractual Genre Blindness: Sancho is very aware that the man he is following is pretty insane and often tells him so, but sometimes has to act according to his master's delusions.
  • Cornered Rattlesnake: Sancho Panza invokes this trope so he can avoid a fight with the squire of the Knight of the Grove, who insists that given that Don Quixote and his master are going to fight, their squires must be doing the same, and bullies Sancho into a fight. Sancho menaces him:
    ..."if a hunted cat, surrounded and hard pressed, turns into a lion, God knows what I, who am a man, may turn into..."
  • Crack is Cheaper: Alonso Quijano was a victim of this phenomenon in-universe. At chapter I Part I we learn that he has acquired a lot of chivalry books (almost three hundred), which is a considerable feat considering that just having a few hundred books in the time in which the story was written (the printing had been discovered in Europe only some years ago) would have been a huge expense. But alas! Then as now, his relatives and friends, who certainly think that this hobby is getting out of control, had no second thoughts to send a lot of his books to the bonfire, even if Don Quixote has spent a lot of money in those books:
    "and to such a pitch did his eagerness and infatuation go that he sold many an acre of tillage land to buy books of chivalry to read"
  • Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: Although Don Quixote is a loon and almost always beaten and humiliated, sometimes he shows that he's got some real balls and fighting chops (e.g., the lion episode).
  • Crushing the Populace: When Don Quixote travels to Barcelona, Sancho gets lost at night in a forest whose trees are filled with feet wearing shoes and stockings. Don Quixote calmly explains that the authorities hang outlaws by the twenties and thirties when they catch them.
  • Damsel in Distress: Deconstructed and Played for Laughs. Don Quixote believes that just about every lady he meets needs to be rescued from villains. Then, Hilarity Ensues.
  • Dashing Hispanic: Don Quixote aspires to be one, and actually does pull off some real badassery (e.g., his adventure with the lion).
  • Daydream Believer:
    • Quixote himself is the archetype of this. And he does not only believe in chivalry books; in Part II, Chapter LXXI, he declares that if he had lived in Homeric times, he could have saved Troy and Carthage by slaying Paris.
    • Sancho Panza is an illiterate peasant that believes everything his master says about Chivalric Romance, and Juan Palomeque the Innkeeper believes Chivalric Romance books because TV Never Lies.
  • Deadpan Snarker:
    • Deconstructed by Sancho Panza: What happens in Real Life to the employee that cannot say anything about his master without being sarcastic? Why, Sancho is beaten by Don Quixote at chapters XX and XXV of Part I, and gives him a hurricane of insults at chapter XLVI. The problem is that a lot of people enjoys Sancho's sarcasm (he is good at it), and so he feels compelled to say it, even when he is in perilous situations, like when he denied payment to an Innkeeper (Chapter XVII part I), and he mocked the entire people of the Braying Town or the highwaymen of Barcelona (Chapters XXVII and LX of the part II) The first give him a beating, the highwaymen almost kill him.
    • The only murder that is explicitly shown in this novel is the bandit who dared to snark to his leader, and Andres (the flogged boy) snarking about Don Quixote's rescue is the first clue the reader has that he was an Asshole Victim all the time.
  • Death by Despair:
    • Parodied by the "resurrection" of Altisidora, a girl who claims to love Don Quixote and invokes this trope (it's really a prank). Don Quixote and Sancho didn't believe it for a minute. When Don Quixote rejects her again:
      Hearing this, Altisidora, with a show of anger and agitation, exclaimed, "God's life! Don Stockfish, soul of a mortar, stone of a date, more obstinate and obdurate than a clown asked a favour when he has his mind made up, if I fall upon you I'll tear your eyes out! Do you fancy, Don Vanquished, Don Cudgelled, that I died for your sake? All that you have seen to-night has been make-believe; I'm not the woman to let the black of my nail suffer for such a camel, much less die!"
      "That I can well believe," said Sancho; "for all that about lovers pining to death is absurd; they may talk of it, but as for doing it-Judas may believe that!"
    • Forced to return to his hometown and lay down his arms by his defeat to the Knight of the White Moon (really his friend Sansón Carrasco), Don Quijote falls seriously ill. His friends believe he is dying of despair over his defeat, but unexpectedly the sickness snaps him out of his delusion, and he expresses relief that he has regained his sanity before dying.
  • Deal with the Devil: Invoked by Don Quixote in chapter XXV of the second volume, in which he and Sancho encounter a magician with a supposed clairvoyant monkey.
  • Deconstruction:
    • Not only of chivalric romances themselves (see below for details), but also of the attitudes they foster in their readers. While Don Quixote takes things to extremes for the sake of a good laugh, Cervantes uses him to make the point that living one's life in the real world strictly by an idealized, incomplete, and oft-contradictory code of chivalry is ultimately an exercise in absurdity.
    • Literary critics note that the second part of the book is perhaps an even more comprehensive deconstruction than Part 1, in that it tackles the thin line between fiction and reality. When Don Quixote and Sancho Panza meet aristocrats, Dukes, Kings, and Village Prefects, the latter engage in petty and cruel games intended to see invoked Don Quixote do something crazy. In their interactions, critics from Miguel de Unamuno and Harold Bloom note, the books make a larger point that all of society essentially rests on a fiction; aristocrats have to act like aristocrats to be aristocrats when their authority and power is actually unearned and arbitrary. In the episode where Sancho Panza is made-to-believe that he's actually a governor of a small village, he proves to be far more competent than the real and actual governor of the village. The point at the end is that, Don Quixote in openly making himself a hero out of chivalry isn't anymore crazy than aristocrats making themselves rulers based on imagined lineage or traditions rather than merit.
    • The nature of reality and fiction get tackled even further in the Puppet Theatre episode of Part II. Don Quixote criticizes a puppet theatre's poor staging of an event in the Crusades and keeps heckling it/stage directing to make it real. Don Quixote's constant needling and addition of details ultimately culminates in a staging so realistic that Don Quixote goes nuts and charges in and fights the puppets himself, completely falling in with the fiction he created. Likewise Don Quixote, while an annoying madman in the first book, in the sequel discovers that he's actually become a Living Legend, with fan authors writing spurious legends of his life while Cide Hamete Benengeli is accurate, but denies him royalties. In other words, Don Quixote somehow managed to become a real-life legendary hero with many alternate versions and apocrypha of his adventures spreading around, but gets neither benefit nor satisfaction from it himself.
  • Deconstructive Parody: Books of chivalry and Fan Dumb are ridiculed by having their tropes applied to real, everyday life.
  • Deconstructor Fleet: The novel not only deconstructs the Chivalric Romance genre, but applies Genre Deconstruction to the next genres: Romance Novel (May–December Romance, Fille Fatale), the Arcadia, Secret Test of Character, Sweet Polly Oliver, Gentleman Thief literature, the Deadpan Snarker (and all kind of snarkers). It also has Unbuilt Tropes like Straw Fan, Lord Error-Prone, Mad Dreamer, Cut Lex Luthor a Check and Book Burning... and given its status as the first modern novel, it's full of Postmodernism.
  • Direct Line to the Author: Cervantes (only referred in the book as "the second author") says that the book was based on some manuscripts he found made by an Arab, Cide Hamete Benengeli (or Sidi Ahmed bin Engeli, as it would be rendered today) whose first name, "Cide", could be translated as "Mister", and whose last name is a pun on "berenjena" (eggplant / aubergine), and translated to Spanish by an anonymous Arab translator. This is parody of how a lot of chivalry books have his authors claim that they are based in an old manuscript found in an ancient pyramid or another ruined building in some faraway country, written in an exotic language by a wise, famed wizard who favored the hero of the novel. Those claims are made to feign that the chivalry book was inspired by real events. Cervantes twists this and uses it to a comic effect, explaining that the next part of the novel was found in some pamphlets and papers (only a few years old) found in Alcaná de Toledo (a real city in Spain) in a silk mercer store, written in Arabic (a fairly known language in Spain) by a (foolish) boy who didn't know what was written in them and so sold the papers to Cervantes for peanuts. If we include the funny name of the wizard and the fact that the second author, the translator and Cide Hamete Benengeli are always making comments about the book, we can see that Cervantes want us to admit that all this tale is a long sequence of lies and nonsense... just like all the chivalry books.
  • Didn't Think This Through: This is what happens when an aging nobleman with little fighting skills and crappy armaments imagines himself a knight-errant.
  • Disco Dan: Deconstructed: Don Quixote's obsession with Chivalric Romance leaves him mentally stuck in an era that barely even existed, and by the time of The Cavalier Years is dead: few people in Spain know, and even fewer care, what an Knight Errant is. So, Don Quixote has to explain what a Knight Errant is time and again through the first part of the novel. First he makes Character Filibusters, then he makes his explanations shorter, and then comes chapter XLVII when Don Quixote is tired and gives up:
    "Haply, gentlemen, you are versed and learned in matters of errant chivalry? Because if you are I will tell you my misfortunes; if not, there is no good in my giving myself the trouble of relating them;"
  • Door Stopper: It's quite a long book, although not obscenely so. The romances of chivalry it parodies tended to be even lengthier.
  • The Dulcinea Effect: Don Quixote, pretty much the Trope Maker — and Trope Namer — for this, is a parody of this trope. The hero Don Quixote, who believes himself to be a knight, claims to serve a beautiful, virtuous young lady, Dulcinea (really named Aldonza Lorenzo, but Don Quixote doesn't care), who is, in fact, nothing more than a peasant from his hometown, and, in some adaptations, a whore. Interestingly, in the original novel as well as in most adaptations, the actual character Dulcinea makes not a single appearance. He knows that the lady is nothing more than a excuse for the hero to have adventures, so he imagines his lady and begins to live his dreams!
  • Faint in Shock: Many, many characters, but the most significant faint has to be Luscinda's. Already having agreed to marry her beloved Cardenio, Luscinda is placed under immense duress when her parents make her marry the nobleman Fernando instead. On the day of the wedding, Luscinda hides a dagger on her body, as well as a letter explaining that her loyalty belongs to Cardenio and that she plans to kill herself. During the wedding, however, Luscinda is unable to defy the pressure and ends up following through with the exchanging of vows and consents to the marriage in a weakened and dismayed voice. Realizing the finality of the situation, Luscinda faints on the spot. Not only does this cause Cardenio to storm out of the wedding feeling betrayed, but Luscinda's suicide plan is also foiled as both her suicide note and her dagger are discovered and removed from her unconscious body. Her despair is so great that she does not wake up from her faint until the following day.
  • Falsely Advertised Accuracy: In-universe, lampshaded by Cervantes... and then played for laughs. In the Preface of the Author, Part I, Cervantes denounces authors who claim that the verses they use in the preface of the book commending that work (a common literary practice at the time) were made by personages identified as famous poets, when with a little research we easily discover they were not, or worse yet, they were illiterate. Simply put, he defines this trope in the 17th century. And then, Cervantes proceeds to make "some commendatory verses" whose authors are some wizards, knights and damsels protagonist of other chivalry books.
  • Fan Disillusionment: After two novels being a literal Ascended Fanboy up to eleven of the Chivalric Romance, Don Quixote must accept in the last chapter that the Cliché Storm that he read as the adventures of a Knight Errant is not as joyous as he thought it would be:
  • Fan Fiction:
  • Flanderization: In the first part of the novel, Sancho Panza gives an Hurricane of Aphorisms only once (Chapter XXVII, part I). In the second part, he gives it continuously, and also his wife and his daughter.
  • Flyover Country: Critics have said La Mancha, don Quixote's home, is the Spanish version of this trope, as the preface to the Gutenberg Project said:
    On many of his readers in Spain, and most of his readers out of it, the significance of his choice of a country for his hero is completely lost. It would be going too far to say that no one can thoroughly comprehend "Don Quixote" without having seen La Mancha, but undoubtedly even a glimpse of La Mancha will give an insight into the meaning of Cervantes such as no commentator can give. Of all the regions of Spain it is the last that would suggest the idea of romance. Of all the dull central plateau of the Peninsula it is the dullest tract. There is something impressive about the grim solitudes of Estremadura; and if the plains of Leon and Old Castile are bald and dreary, they are studded with old cities renowned in history and rich in relics of the past. But there is no redeeming feature in the Manchegan landscape; it has all the sameness of the desert without its dignity; the few towns and villages that break its monotony are mean and commonplace, there is nothing venerable about them, they have not even the picturesqueness of poverty; indeed, Don Quixote's own village, Argamasilla, has a sort of oppressive respectability in the prim regularity of its streets and houses; everything is ignoble; the very windmills are the ugliest and shabbiest of the windmill kind.
  • Forgotten Trope:
    • The novel shows us an example of the Captivity Narrative when Ruy Pérez de Viedma relates all his biography in "The Story of the Captive Captain"; you can see more at Life Embellished.
    • Don Quixote mentions the Nine Worthies: Nine characters who personified the ideal values of a brave knight. They were three pagans (Alexander The Great, Hector, and Julius Caesar), three Jewish (Joshua, Salomon, and Juda Maccabee) and three Christians (King Arthur, Charlemagne, and Godfrey of Bouillion). All of those figures are still very well-known, but most people are not familiar with the idea of all of them united in a single rhetoric concept. When Quixote was wounded by some Badass Bystander and helped by some neighbor, and the neighbor claims Don Quixote is not a Knight Errant, Don Quixote claims: "I know who I am," and adds, "and I know that I may be not only those I have named, but all the Twelve Peers of France and even all the Nine Worthies, since my achievements surpass all that they have done all together and each of them on his own account." Justified, since Quixote is Fan Dumb about Chivalric Romance and he must know everything about knights errant. The real ironic part is that in-universe Quixote is only a Loony Fan who cannot match them, but in Real Life, more people know who Don Quixote is than the Nine Worthies... so this Badass Boast became Hilarious in Hindsight.

    G-L 
  • Genius Ditz: Don Quixote, despite his reputation as a crazy, is highly intelligent, and several characters who come across him note that he occasionally sounds rational and sane before going off tangent on his chivalric ideals. Several characters who later trick him note that he's fairly astute about the minor points that concern a given situation, but neglects the bigger picture altogether.
  • Genre Savvy: Apart from the protagonist (who is Wrong Genre Savvy), many other characters are familiar with chivalric tropes and invoke or discuss them. Note that at the end of both volumes, Don Quixote is defeated and forced to return to his village in strict accordance with the laws of the genre.
  • Gentle Giant: Part I Chapter I reveals that the giant Morgante is one of Alonso Quixano's favorite characters, because despite being a giant, he is affable and well bred.
  • The Ghost:
    • Played straight with Aldonza Lorenzo, a young peasant girl from a town called Toboso, who is blissfully unaware that Don Quixote's had a crush on her. She never appeared in neither parts of the novel, only was referred to by other characters.
    • Parodied by Dulcinea del Toboso, the imaginary love interest of Don Quixote. Since the first part of the novel, Don Quixote imagines her as a beautiful noblewoman who lives in a castle, or in other words, a person completely different from Aldonza Lorenzo. This imaginary entity is a literal ghost, but it's mentioned so many times across the novel that she can be considered the third protagonist besides Don Quixote and Sancho. Besides, in the second part, one of the plot points is Don Quixote's quest to disenchant Dulcinea and to find her at last, even when he knows he imagined her, is another proof of Don Quixote's madness.
  • Go Mad from the Revelation: Inverted: Don Quixote goes mad trying to make sense of the Purple Prose that plagued the chivalry books he has read, but there never was any reveal because even Aristotle could not have made sense of it.
  • Gratuitous Latin: This trope is lampshaded twice by Cervantes:
  • Healing Potion: Parodied. Don Quixote claims to have the recipe for an elixir that heals all wounds, but being who he is, it instead induces severe pain and vomiting, though after throwing up he does seem to get up easier.
  • Heroic Wannabe: Practically made this trope Older Than Steam: Don Quixote is obsessed with becoming a knight (to the point of fighting windmills because he thinks they're giants).
  • Hero's Muse: The eponymous hero fights for his lady love, whom he refers to as Dulcinea. In his mind, he elevates her to a princess and the most beautiful woman in the world, although she is in reality a peasant girl named Aldonza.
  • Hikikomori: Somewhat of an Ur-Example. Don Quixote seems to be living in his village for years, doing nothing but hunting, reading romances of chivalry, selling his property to pay for them (books were a lot more expensive then) and discussing them with his friends. Justified, because the landed gentry of the time were expected to do little else.
  • Hypocritical Humor: When Don Quixote reads some pages of Avellaneda's Quixote fanfic, he claims there are obvious errors from the author, the most important is that he errs on the name of Sancho's wife, when the name of Sancho's wife changed in Cervantes' own books: at the same page in Part I Chapter 7 (Juana Gutiérrez and Mari Gutiérrez), in Part I Chapter LII (Juana Panza), changes again at Part II Chapter V (Teresa Panza and Teresa Cascajo) and in Part II Chapter L (Teresa Panza).
    ...is that he goes wrong and departs from the truth in the most important part of the history, for here he says that my squire Sancho Panza's wife is called Mari Gutierrez, when she is called nothing of the sort, but Teresa Panza; and when a man errs on such an important point as this there is good reason to fear that he is in error on every other point in the history."
    "A nice sort of historian, indeed!" exclaimed Sancho at this; "he must know a deal about our affairs when he calls my wife Teresa Panza, Mari Gutierrez; take the book again, señor, and see if I am in it and if he has changed my name."
  • Honor Before Reason: The protagonist falls victim to this trope countless times. The first example is when Don Quixote "rescues" Andrés from being flogged by his master, Juan Haduldo. Don Quixote bullies Juan into promising to let Andres go, and he departs to other adventures, because he has read that when a Knight gives his word, it's enough. Unfortunately, this is the first modern novel and Juan flogs Andres even harder.
  • Hot-Blooded: Don Quixote sure makes a lot of passionate speeches, and charges forward with aplomb, later subverted when he denies chivalry with the same passion.
  • Hourglass Plot: In the first part of the novel, Don Quixote is a Daydream Believer Mad Dreamer, and Sancho Panza has Simpleminded Wisdom and represents realism. Both are Static Characters. At the second part, Sancho is influenced by Don Quixote and becomes more and more of a Daydream Believer, while at the end, Don Quixote will become Bored with Insanity by Sancho's influence. The relevance is that they maybe were the very first characters in literature to use this trope and become Dynamic Characters.
  • Humiliation Conga: Practically every single chapter ends up being this to Quixote and Sancho.
  • Hurricane of Aphorisms: Sancho Panza does this, usually so poorly that it just makes him look stupider. Interestingly, in the First part of the novel he does it only once. In the second part, he gives those almost always, and his wife and daughter too.
  • Idiot Hero: If not the Trope Maker, pretty much the Trope Codifier, though it's subverted: Don Quixote is not an idiot, and we know it since the very beginning of the novel. He is a very intelligent, well-educated man, who is perfectly normal as long as he is not talking about his obsessions. Of course, when he is indulging his chivalry fantasies... well... up to eleven if you think that in the end when he denies chivalry, Don Quixote is portrayed as the Only Sane Man and even as the ideal man. Part I, chapter 30:
    "apart from the silly things which this worthy gentleman says in connection with his craze, when other subjects are dealt with, he can discuss them in a perfectly rational manner, showing that his mind is quite clear and composed; so that, provided his chivalry is not touched upon, no one would take him to be anything but a man of thoroughly sound understanding."
  • If I Can't Have You…: Part II, chapter LX, Claudia Jeronima and Don Vicente Tornellas, from different factions of the civil war that was plaguing Barcelona, secretly fall in love and planned to marry, but one day Claudia Jerónima learned that Don Vicente wants to marry another woman. The next day, overwhelmed and exasperated, she shot him. And then she learned that he never intended to marry any other woman than Claudia.
  • Imaginary Enemy: Don Quixote fights an unending stream of foes; all of them existing only in his delusional mind. Chief among these is Friston the magician, an imaginary character who Quixote imagines as the thief of his books and the enchanter of the windmills.
  • Impoverished Patrician: Alonso Quijano is an Hidalgo that still has the ancient arms of his ancestors, but has so little money that almost all of it is spent on food. What can he do? He is very smart and talented, so he could work, but if he does, he will lose the few privileges he has as an hidalgo (like, to be excused from paying taxes). He is poor and bored. It does not help that he spent a lot of time in those silly chivalry books. Sure, they help him with the boredom, and the knight life is certainly exciting, but they are only absurd tales, right?
  • The Insomniac: Alonso Quijano is a type B, as described in Part I Chapter I: lead by his obsession to read chivalry books, he sleeps less and less while reading more and more and that sends him over the edge.
  • Insanity Defense: The reason why Don Quixote is never killed (but often beaten) by the poor Innocent Bystander of the day.
    The landlord shouted to them to leave him alone, for he had already told them that he was mad, and as a madman he would not be accountable even if he killed them all.
  • In Which a Trope Is Described: Played straight with almost all the chapters of the two parts because the beginning of a chapter summarizes the chapter's events, but then inverted in some chapters that do not summarize anything:
    Part II, Chapter 70 WHICH FOLLOWS SIXTY-NINE AND DEALS WITH MATTERS INDISPENSABLE FOR THE CLEAR COMPREHENSION OF THIS HISTORY
    Part II, Chapter 66 WHICH TREATS OF WHAT HE WHO READS WILL SEE, OR WHAT HE WHO HAS IT READ TO HIM WILL HEAR
  • Just Like Robin Hood: Deconstructed by Roque Guinart, a deconstruction of the Gentleman Thief, who leads a band of highwaymen at Barcelona's Civil War. He is an armed beggar, that takes only a part of the money of his victims... by asking them. His 60 men assault two soldiers (300 crowns), a Noblewoman (600 crowns) and some pilgrims (60 reals). That would have been 15 crowns and a real for each highwayman. Roque asks for 60 crowns for the soldiers (20%) and 80 crowns from the Noblewoman (13.6%). That's 140 crowns. He gives 2 crowns to each highwayman and the 20 crown left he gives 10 to the pilgrims (that's almost 100 reals) and 10 crowns to Sancho Panza in a clear attempt to Buy Them Off. The people who attacked are happy to keep most of their own money, and Roque Guinart is considered a hero. Everyone is happy! Except for the highwaymen who were cheated of 13 crowns and a real, but Roque manages to Make an Example of Them by murdering the one who dares to be a Deadpan Snarker.
  • "Kick Me" Prank: They play this prank on Don Quixote at Barcelona:
    That afternoon they took Don Quixote out for a stroll, not in his armour but in street costume, with a surcoat of tawny cloth upon him, that at that season would have made ice itself sweat. Orders were left with the servants to entertain Sancho so as not to let him leave the house. Don Quixote was mounted, not on Rocinante, but upon a tall mule of easy pace and handsomely caparisoned. They put the surcoat on him, and on the back, without his perceiving it, they stitched a parchment on which they wrote in large letters, "This is Don Quixote of La Mancha." As they set out upon their excursion the placard attracted the eyes of all who chanced to see him, and as they read out, "This is Don Quixote of La Mancha," Don Quixote was amazed to see how many people gazed at him, called him by his name, and recognised him, and turning to Don Antonio, who rode at his side, he observed to him, "Great are the privileges knight-errantry involves, for it makes him who professes it known and famous in every region of the earth; see, Don Antonio, even the very boys of this city know me without ever having seen me."
  • Knight in Shining Armor:
    • What Don Quixote thinks he is, and thereby thoroughly deconstructs.
    • Don Quixote consider Amadis of Gaul the Ur-Example up to eleven:
      I would have thee know, Sancho, that the famous Amadis of Gaul was one of the most perfect knights-errant—I am wrong to say he was one; he stood alone, the first, the only one, the lord of all that were in the world in his time. A fig for Don Belianis, and for all who say he equaled him in any respect, for, my oath upon it, they are deceiving themselves! ... In the same way Amadis was the polestar, day-star, sun of valiant and devoted knights, whom all we who fight under the banner of love and chivalry are bound to imitate.
  • Knighting: Parodied at Part I Chapter III when Don Quixote insists that an innkeeper (who he thinks is a Castellan) knight him after he has watched his armor in the castle chapel — that is, in the stable of the inn. This shows that Don Quixote could be mad, but he knows exactly how the ceremony must be.
  • The Lady's Favour: Deconstructed when (even if it's only part of a scam), Altisidora gave Don Quixote three kerchiefs that later are stolen by bandits:
    Roque on coming up asked Sancho if his men had returned and restored to him the treasures and jewels they had stripped off Dapple. Sancho said they had, but that three kerchiefs that were worth three cities were missing.
    "What are you talking about, man?" said one of the bystanders; "I have got them, and they are not worth three reals."
    "That is true," said Don Quixote; "but my squire values them at the rate he says, as having been given me by the person who gave them."
  • The Law of Conservation of Detail: This law is invoked by the Innkeeper when he and Don Quixote discuss at Part I Chapter III the need for money being a Knight Errant who is Walking the Earth, (Don Quixote doesn't have any money because he never has read about a Knight Errant paying for anything) and helps to deconstruct those tropes in the book.
    On this point the landlord told him he was mistaken; for, though not recorded in the histories, because in the author's opinion there was no need to mention anything so obvious and necessary as money and clean shirts, it was not to be supposed therefore that they did not carry them,
  • Life Embellished: Ruy Pérez de Viedma relates all his biography in "The Story of the Captive Captain". He was a handsome captive captain who wanted to escape the Moors and was helped by Zoraida, a beautiful Moor princess who wanted to convert to Christianity. The captain organized a successful escape to Spain, was well received by his powerful and rich relatives and married Zoraida. Cervantes was a captive who failed all his evasion intents, his family paid his rescue and he always was an Impoverished Patrician.
  • Long List:
  • Loony Fan: Sansón Carrasco presents himself as a fan of Don Quixote and discuss with him and Sancho the Series Continuity Errors, and wants to help that poor, mad fool to regain sanity. Hilarity Ensues.
  • Lord Error-Prone: Pretty much the Trope Maker and the Ur-Example: In the first part of the novel, Cervantes settles Don Quixote characterization as this: he almost kills the Vizcayan at chapter IX and maimed for life the Licenciate at chapter XIX. Fandom insisted in seeing him as the much more sympathetic Mad Dreamer.
  • Lost in Translation: Cervantes is constantly making puns and wordplay, most of which is untranslatable; one joke in the Spanish version is that even when everyone understands the term "island", only truly sophisticated people understand the term "insula". So, Sancho doesn't really understand what an "insula" really is, but he desperately wants to rule one, so he would be tricked later in a scam to rule a little town that is not an island. In some English translations (for example, the Gutenberg Project) this joke is Lost in Translation.
  • Love Martyr: Part II, chapter LX, Don Vicente Tornellas has been shot by his fiancée Claudia Jeronima because she believed that Don Vicente wanted to marry another woman. Don Vicente's last words are to tell her that he was innocent, never intended to marry any other woman, that he considers himself lucky to talk with her in his last moments of life, and then his last act before dying is to give Jeronima his hand and ask her to make him her husband.

    M-S 
  • Mad Dreamer: The first part of the novel settles Don Quixote as Lord Error-Prone. Fandom insisted to see him as the Ur-Example of the much more sympathetic Mad Dreamer. Cervantes wanted to explore all ramifications of this new trope: Don Quixote is welcomed by people of all classes... because they want to mock him. One character even gives the aesop that "the gain by Don Quixote's sanity can never equal the enjoyment his crazes give".
  • Made of Iron: Don Quixote is, arguably, one. He can survive being thrown into the air by a windmill. Also, despite all the beatings he takes throughout the novel, he still survives to the end. Quixote also receives some serious damage during his fights, he loses half his right ear about half a dozen teeth, and shrugs them off with nothing more than a quip about the nobleness of Knight-Errantry. Indeed, as noted by novelist and critic, Vladimir Nabokov, despite being seen as a crazy knight, Don Quixote actually wins more fights than he loses.
  • May–December Romance:
    • Don Quixote is around 50; Dulcinea, being an unmarried peasant girl, is probably less than 20. Not that she knows anything about her pretender's interest, though.
    • Deconstructed with Altisidora and Don Quixote in the second part: Altisidora, a 14 year old maiden at the Duke’s palace, pretends to be in love with Don Quixote. He stoically accepts her teasing and mean pranks because he believes she's in love with him, but he never attempts anything because he wants to be loyal to Dulcinea and is very happy when he abandons her and the palace. Being an honest man, he confesses to Sancho that Altisidora’s feelings caused him more confusion than pity, showing us how awkward and foolish would be this kind of relationship in reality.
  • Meaningful Name:
    • Dulcinea, the name Don Quixote gives to his random Love Interest, could be translated as "Sweety".
    • Doctor Pedro Recio (could be translated as "Doctor Hard Rock"), a doctor who insists that Sancho, as a governor, must have a very strict diet.
    • The very title name itself, quixote (Modern Spanish quijote) means "cuisse", the thighplate of a knightly armour.
  • Misaimed Fandom: In-universe, in Part I, Chapter I: Who is Alonso Quixano's favorite knight? Well, Reinaldos of Montalban. And why? "Because he robbed everyone he meet!"
  • MockGuffin: The Golden Helmet of Mambrino, an artifact from romance novels that supposedly made its wearer invincible, is the former Trope Namer. Don Quixote sees a barber wearing his brass basin on his head to keep out the rain and assumes that the basin is the Golden Helmet and takes it for himself.
  • Mook Chivalry: At chapter IV, Don Quixote lampshades it and invokes it, but he concedes to the Victimized Bystanders that they don’t have to follow it:
  • Moving the Goalposts:
    • Played for Laughs:
      • Sancho is offered dinner with a lot of delicious dishes. Every dish they present him, a doctor signals that he cannot have it because it’s not in a governor’s diet. This is done until an angry Sancho asks what he can eat: only some cookies and fruit.
      • Sancho asks an innkeeper what food he has to offer. The innkeeper answers that every meat, fish or bird he could ask. Everything Sancho asks, the innkeeper doesn’t have. When Sancho asks what does the innkeeper really has, he answers only a couple of cow-heels.
    • Played for Drama when Dorothea recounts how she agreed to sleep with Don Fernando, son of the Duke, under a promise of marriage, she was constantly Moving the Goalposts. In retrospect, Dorothea realizes that when Don Fernando answered “yes” to all her demands, that was the proof that he would fulfill none of them.
      "All this that I have now repeated I said to him, and much more which I cannot recollect; but it had no effect in inducing him to forego his purpose; he who has no intention of paying does not trouble himself about difficulties when he is striking the bargain.
  • The Musical: Man of La Mancha, with showtune standard "The Impossible Dream".
  • Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Countless times, Don Quixote's chivalric antics make things only worse. All Don Quixote's adventures end like this, just to see the first of them, Chapter IV Part I: Don Quixote rescues Andres, a boy shepherd who was flogged by his master Juan Haduldo, and trusts Juan to pay Andres his salary (because the knights in Chivalric Romance always keep their word). Just after Don Quixote leaves, Juan brutally flogs Andres and doesn't pay him.
  • New Media Are Evil: Spain at the Cavalier Years had just discovered the printing press, and books were considered this trope. The Book Burning the Moral Guardians enact at first part chapter VI to cure Don Quixote's madness has not the darker connotations associated to the trope (and it's full of Take Thats against badly written books), and at chapter IV of the Second Part, when Don Quixote and Sansón Carrasco discuss reputed writers that lost prestige when they publish their works on the new printing presses, Carrasco explains that a printed book makes easier to explore for any kind of error, and Fan Dumb is always envy of great creators, because they have never produced a book. (Incidentally, Cervantes got a lot of critiques because the first part of Don Quixote was plagued with Series Continuity Errors).
  • Nobody Poops: Comically averted in chapter XX of the First Part.
  • No Fourth Wall: Numerous characters in the second part recognize Don Quixote and Sancho Panza by having read the first part. Considering that this was written in the 17th century, it's a textbook case of a trope used avant la lettre.
  • No Hero Discount: The Innkeeper answers to Don Quixote's claim that There Should Be a Law that forces Hospitality for Heroes on knights errant like himself.
    "I have little to do with that," replied the innkeeper; "pay me what you owe me, and let us have no more talk of chivalry, for all I care about is to get my money."
  • Oh, Crap, There Are Fanfics of Us!: At chapter LIX of the second part, Don Quixote hears some guys talking about the fanfic Avellaneda wrote about Don Quixote. This is only the beginning of Don Quixote and Sancho continuous attacks against Avellaneda for the Character Derailment in the rest of the novel.
    The instant Don Quixote heard his own name be started to his feet and listened with open ears to catch what they said about him, and heard the Don Jeronimo who had been addressed say in reply, "Why would you have us read that absurd stuff, Don Juan, when it is impossible for anyone who has read the First Part of the history of 'Don Quixote of La Mancha' to take any pleasure in reading this Second Part?"
    "For all that," said he who was addressed as Don Juan, "we shall do well to read it, for there is no book so bad but it has something good in it. What displeases me most in it is that it represents Don Quixote as now cured of his love for Dulcinea del Toboso."
    On hearing this Don Quixote, full of wrath and indignation, lifted up his voice and said, "Whoever he may be who says that Don Quixote of La Mancha has forgotten or can forget Dulcinea del Toboso, I will teach him with equal arms that what he says is very far from the truth; for neither can the peerless Dulcinea del Toboso be forgotten, nor can forgetfulness have a place in Don Quixote; his motto is constancy, and his profession to maintain the same with his life and never wrong it."
  • Older Than They Think:
    • In-Universe: This is only one of the Common Fan Fallacies Alonso Quixano falls into in the first chapter of the novel, showing us his descent from Fanboy to Fandumb:
      • In Part I, Chapter I: Bernardo del Carpio is one of Alonso Quixano's favorite knights, because he found the way to defeat Roland the Enchanted. Roland was invulnerable to bladed weapons everywhere except the soles of his feet, so he worse shoes with 7 iron soles. To counter this instead of attacking him with a sword, Bernardo simply strangled Roland... Cool, isn't it? But not as cool as the first time this tale was told, as our narrator reminds us.
      • In Part I, Chapter I: The giant Morgante is one of Alonso Quixano’s favorite characters, because despite being a giant, (and in the chivalry books all giants are arrogant and angry), he is affable and well bred... It’s cool, isn’t it? the whole point is that Alonso Quixano thinks this kind of character is original of his beloved chivalry books, but really it's not.
  • Only Sane Man:
    • Sancho. And even then, he still willingly follows Quixote and even believes some of the ridiculous things he's told, because he's a simple peasant who doesn't know any better.
    • Better examples are the unnamed ecclesiastic from chapter XXXI and the unnamed Castilian for chapter LXII, both from part II. They are the only ones who publicly recognize that Don Quixote is a crazy fool, and lampshade that everyone who makes jokes on him is also a crazy fool, too.
  • Out-of-Character Moment: Lampshaded: In the first part, it's very clear that Sancho Panza is a naïve simpleton. In the second part, Sancho suddenly says very intelligent things to his wife. One of the "narrators" of this tale, seeing this inconsistency, decides to warn us: "The translator of this history, when he comes to write this fifth chapter, says that he considers it apocryphal, because in it Sancho Panza speaks in a style unlike that which might have been expected from his limited intelligence, and says things so intelligent that he does not think it possible he could have conceived them; however, desirous of doing what his task imposed upon him, he was unwilling to leave it untranslated, and therefore he went on to say": This could be considered the beginning of Sancho's slow transformation into a wiser person.
  • Picaresque: Arguably, the novel's true genre, being a satiric prose depicting in realistic, humorous detail the adventures of a roguish hero living by his wits ("wits" meaning here "craziness") through a Random Events Plot.
  • Punny Name:
    • In a 17th century's pun, Quixote means "cuisse", the piece of armor covering the thigh. Modern Spanish form is quijote.
    • Don Quixote's real name, Alonso Quijano, is a pun on "quijada" (jaw), as he's also a rather skinny guy.
    • Panza means "belly", specifically a big one. Accordingly, Sancho is fat.
    • Rocinante's name contains "rocín", still used today in Spanish to name any ugly, skinny or generally bad-quality horse. Don Quijote needs four days to think up the name, which by his intention comes from "Rocín antes", "a rocín before", to signify that the horse (in his mind) has now been promoted to a mighty warhorse. However, the name can also be interpreted as "being a rocín", which is more revealing of the truth about Rocinante.
  • Purple Prose: Played straight, parodied and lampshaded: Cervantes achieved the rare miracle of having a florid style that is clearly understandable. But he recognized and denounced this trope:
  • Random Events Plot: Given that the first part of the novel is a Deconstructive Parody of Chivalric Romance, and those books were not more than a Knight Errant in the road reacting to the events that happened to him, the first part is this (the second part has a plot in Dulcinea's rescue). Only that instead of being boring or confusing, Cervantes aimed, and was able, to reproduce the feel of Real Life in his book.
  • "Rashomon"-Style: At chapter XII of Part I, Don Quixote hears conflicted versions of the story of Chrysostom and Marcela in his way to Chrysostom's funeral: Shepherd Pedro thinks Marcela is a good person. Ambrosio, Chrysostom's best friend, calls her cruel, but admits it's an Informed Flaw. Chrysostom poem claims he is a Love Martyr and Marcela is a cruel Ice Queen. At the end, Marcela claims she is So Beautiful, It's a Curse and he has the right, as a free woman, to reject anyone. Nobody says, but everybody implies, Spurned into Suicide.
  • Real After All: Sancho Panza is fooled by the Duke to assume a governorship (really a complicated series of scams just to prank Sancho). When Sancho patrols his Insula, he is victim of various pranksters, except for the last one, a Sweet Polly Oliver that no one knows, who is a girl who has escaped his Gilded Cage, to all the pranksters' confusion.
  • Reconstruction: At the very end of the novel, the narrator notes that Don Quixote's bull-headedness and steadfast impossible perseverance and commitment to his idea, which thus far was used to parody chivalric tropes, made him an even greater hero than all the false chivalric heroes that he aspired to, and whose stories his own story would completely eclipse.
  • Retcon: In Part II, Cervantes tried to correct some of the most glaring continuity errors of the first book, particularly the mysterious disappearance of Sancho's donkey.
  • Revealing Cover-Up: Parodied by the Moral Guardians who become Threshold Guardians: In his first sally, Don Quixote doesn't find any dragons, enchanters, or damsels in distress. He is very disappointed when he comes back to his house, where their family and two Moral Guardians have made a Book Burning of his Chivalric Romance books. To avoid Don Quixote's ire, the Moral Guardians advise the family to tell him, literally, that A Wizard Did It. That excuse was Don Quixote's first contact with the Medieval European Fantasy he so desperately wanted to live! If the Moral Guardians had told him the truth, he would never have persevered in his madness.
  • Sarcastic Devotee: Deconstructed by Sancho Panza: What happens in Real Life to the employee that cannot say anything about his master without being sarcastic? Why, Sancho is beaten by Don Quixote at chapters XX and XXV of Part I, and gives him a hurricane of insults at chapter XLVI. The problem is that a lot of people enjoy Sancho's sarcasm (he is good at it), and so he feels compelled to say it, even when he is in perilous situations, like when he denied payment to a Innkeeper (Chapter XVII part I), and he mocked the entire people of the Braying Town or the highwaymen of Barcelona (Chapters XXVII and LX of the part II) The first give him a beating, while the highwaymen almost kill him.
  • Satire/Parody/Pastiche:
    • Cervantes, both in the prologue and in the novel itself parodies the way contemporary writers wrote, satirized characters, books, made allusions to many, MANY other works and made a huge impact at the time it was printed.
    • On another level, the book is also a satire of Spanish society of the era — a vainglorious and out-of-touch hidalgo class, increasingly wedded to an idealized picture of their own past, concocting wild and unrealistic schemes to increase their nation's (and their own) prestige and stringing an ignorant lower class along with promises of prosperity and social mobility.
  • Scheherezade Gambit: Sancho tries to do this to Quixote to keep him from charging against a watermill (Quixote had something with mills). He forgets about what he was telling. It's actually even funnier given that the story he tells Quixote was a common children's story of the time, and is supposed to work like a lullaby, repeating a useless element over and over until the kid goes to sleep.
  • Screening the Call: If Quixote's reading-induced insanity is his Call to Adventure, then the attempt to burn his books is an attempt to Screen the Call.
  • Secret Test of Character: Deconstructed in the Novel Within a Novel, The Ill-Advised Curiosity where Anselmo asks his best friend Lotario to test the fidelity of his wife, Camila. In any other story, Camila would pass the test and everyone would live Happily Ever After. In the novel, Camila and Lotario became lovers, causing the tragic deaths of the three.
  • Series Continuity Error: For a book that only has one continuation, there are various examples of those errors. Then again, Cervantes was mocking those fans who put too much attention to continuity... There are two types:
  • Satellite Love Interest: This trope is parodied and exaggerated with Dulcinea del Toboso, a lover that Don Quixote imagined from a peasant girl called Aldonza Lorenzo. She represents for him all that is lovable about a woman without any of the defects of a real person, and he only imagined her so he can undertake adventures in her name. She becomes the illogical extreme of this trope, because she isn't even aware of her status as love interest of Don Quixote.
  • Self-Proclaimed Knight: Defied, but played straight: Don Quixote is truly Genre Savvy at Chivalric Romance books. Chapter III shows him aware of this trope and he tries to defy it when he insists to an innkeeper (who he thinks is a castellan) to knight him after he has watched his armor in the castle chapel -- that is, in the stable of the inn. So Don Quixote believes he has averted this trope. However, Las partidas de Alfonso el Sabio, the Spanish chivalry code, states that a man cannot be knighted if he is too poor or if he is knighted as a joke... so, Don Quixote, being an Impoverished Patrician trying to defy this trope, only has enforced it.
  • Serious Business:
  • Servile Snarker: Deconstructed by Sancho Panza: What happens in Real Life to the employee that cannot say anything about his master without being sarcastic? Why, Sancho is beaten by Don Quixote at chapters XX and XXV of Part I, and gives him a hurricane of insults at chapter XLVI. The problem is that a lot of people enjoys Sancho's sarcasm (he is good at it), and so he feels compelled to say it, even when he is in perilous situations, like when he denied payment to a Innkeeper (Chapter XVII part I), and he mocked the entire people of the Braying Town or the highwaymen of Barcelona (Chapters XXVII and LX of the part II) The first give him a beating, the highwaymen almost kill him.
  • Shout-Out: Hundreds upon hundreds of them, although many would be unrecognizable to the modern reader.
    • Chapter I part I mentions Aristotle, philosopher widely regarded as the greatest abstract thinker of western civilization. Even he has no chance to make sense of the purple prose that plagued chivalry books.
    • Chapter XXII part I, Gines de Pasamonte mentions he writes an autobiography about himself.
      Don Quixote: Is it so good?
      Gines de Pasamonte: So good is it, that a fig for Lazarillo de Tormes, and all of that kind that have been written, or shall be written compared with it: all I will say about it is that it deals with facts, and facts so neat and diverting that no lies could match them.
    • Chapter III part II, Don Quixote's opinion about history and poetry reflects the theory exposed in Aristotle's Poetics.
  • Show Within a Show: The Ill-Advised Curiosity is a true novel within a novel, and the priest reads it to all the guests in the inn completely through two chapters of the first part.
  • Simpleminded Wisdom: Sancho Panza has this trait.
  • Slapstick: And charging against a windmill is just in chapter 8 of 126 chapters!!!
  • Small Name, Big Ego: Grand Dame Dueña Doña Rodríguez is the only one character stupid enough in all the novel (and in-universe, in all Spain) to sincerely believe that Don Quixote is a real Knight Errant.
  • Small Reference Pools: This trope is defined and lampshaded by Cervantes in the Preface of the Author, Part I, denouncing a common author trick: Any Spanish author of XVII century only needs to mention the most obvious and world-renowned people or facts. And he doesn't even need to know those facts, he could only research a book that quotes famous authors from A to Z and just insert the examples in his own book, because some readers are simple enough to believe that the author can use all those quotes in any book.
  • So Beautiful, It's a Curse: Deconstructed with Marcela: At Chrysostom's funeral, she makes a speech claiming she is not an Ice Queen, and she states her beauty is a drawback, in a remote and inaccessible forest, claiming that she is free and if Chrysostom chose to be Spurned into Suicide, it was his decision... but no one in her audience (made by men) hears anything and they are only interested in Marcela's beauty. They want to follow her, but Marcela was in a remote point to prevent them from following her... because she has been through this situation all her life.
  • Superhero Sobriquets: Don Quixote is given one by Sancho Panza: "The Knight of the Sorrowful Face". note  The reason is, as Sancho says, he had never seen a sadder face than that of Don Quixote's. Later, after the incident with the lions, Sancho calls him, without irony, as "The Knight of the Lions".
  • Sweet Polly Oliver:
    • Dorothea, from the first part, plays this trope perfectly straight. At the second part, this trope will be parodied and deconstructed.
    • The daughter of Don Pedro de la Llana parodies this trope: The Ingenue who has been in a Gilded Cage all his life and asked his brother to show her the world... that is, the little town they live... at night. Justified because she is Just a Kid who has lived in a Gilded Cage, and really doesn’t know better.
    • Clingy Jealous Girl Claudia Jeronima deconstructs this trope: She is wearing men's clothes because she has murdered a supposedly unfaithful lover and Barcelona is having a Civil War. She wants to conceal her identity so her family would not be harmed by anyone seeking revenge.
    • The exiled Ana Felix deconstructs this trope: Fleeing for Spain for having a Muslim father, she enters Algiers, where the King blackmails her to steal his family treasure hidden in Spain. So she wears men's clothes to come back with the King's soldiers and mislead the Spanish authorities.

    T-Z 
  • Take That!: Cervantes uses his book to attack several people and institutions of the XVII century, always in a funny manner:
  • There Should Be a Law:
  • Threshold Guardians: Deconstructed by the curate and the barber: Don Quixote's family asks help from Moral Guardians to destroy Don Quixote's delusions, but their pity makes them pull a Revealing Cover-Up that enforces those delusions, making them Threshold Guardians.
  • Those Two Guys: Pedro Pérez, the priest, and Maese Nicholas, the barber. Better known as "the priest and the barber", two guys from the same town as Don Quixote, who are fond of chivalry books, like Don Quixote, and that are completely sane, unlike Don Quixote, and... well, you would not find any other personality trait in them.
  • TV Never Lies: This is one of the themes of the novel: Juan Palomeque, the innkeeper, believes that Chivalric Romance stories are real because these are printed in books approved by the Royal Council:
    "But consider, brother," said the curate once more, "there never was any Felixmarte of Hircania in the world, nor any Cirongilio of Thrace, or any of the other knights of the same sort, that the books of chivalry talk of; the whole thing is the fabrication and invention of idle wits, devised by them for the purpose you describe of beguiling the time, as your reapers do when they read; for I swear to you in all seriousness there never were any such knights in the world, and no such exploits or nonsense ever happened anywhere."
    "Try that bone on another dog," said the innkeeper; "as if I did not know how many make five, and where my shoe pinches me; don't think to feed me with pap, for by God I am no fool. It is a good joke for your worship to try and persuade me that everything these good books say is nonsense and lies, and they printed by the license of the Lords of the Royal Council, as if they were people who would allow such a lot of lies to be printed all together, and so many battles and enchantments that they take away one's senses."
  • Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny: Alonso Quijano and his friends the curate and the barber were victims of this phenomenon and in the very first chapter of part I we learn that they had a lot of discussions about who had been the better knight... Keep in mind this book was written more than four hundred years ago!
  • Undying Loyalty: Sancho Panza claims to have this for Don Quixote... even when Sancho considers several times in the book to left Don Quixote service, but he is so fond of him he never does it.
    ...if I were wise I should have left my master long ago; but this was my fate, this was my bad luck; I can't help it, I must follow him; we're from the same village, I've eaten his bread, I'm fond of him, I'm grateful, he gave me his ass-colts, and above all I'm faithful; so it's quite impossible for anything to separate us, except the pickaxe and shovel.
  • Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist: The first part of the novel settles Don Quixote characterization as a Lord Error-Prone: he almost kills the Biscayan in Chapter IX and maimed for life the Licentiate in Chapter XIX. This makes it easier to read the continuous Humiliation Conga in practically all the chapters for Don Quixote. Fandom insisted in seeing him as the much more sympathetic Mad Dreamer. The second part deconstructs the Mad Dreamer into a Wide-Eyed Idealist that everyone else mocks mercilessly because Humans Are Bastards.
  • Unwanted Assistance: Many characters (most memorably Andrés, the flogged boy) find Don Quixote's interference unhelpful.
    'For the love of God, sir knight-errant, if you ever meet me again, though you may see them cutting me to pieces, give me no aid or succour, but leave me to my misfortune, which will not be so great but that a greater will come to me by being helped by your worship, on whom and all the knights-errant that have ever been born God send his curse.
  • Unreliable Narrator: Several layers of this, actually. Lampshaded, even: In the very first paragraph, Don Quixote's literary portrait has the narrator NOT telling us the name of Don Quixote's town, and the narrator admits he doesn't know very well if his name was Quixada, Quesada, or Quexana. For the people of the 17th century, this was an infringement of a very well-known rule of the literary portrait, and so they immediately had the real impression that the author was a liar. Also, the original author (Cide Hamete Benengeli) and the Translator (an anonymous Moor) comment the text when the plot is being implausible, and the second author (Cervantes), constantly reminds us that this is a true history. All these tricks show that Cervantes clearly want the reader to realize that this tale cannot be true. Not to mention the fact that the so-called original author has an Arabic name. At that time in Spain, Arabs were thought to be liars.
  • Ur-Example: This book is often presented as one of the first, if not the first examples of postmodernism in literature.
  • Very Loosely Based on a True Story: The Captive's Tale is loosely based on the author's own life.
  • Victimized Bystander: Most of the people Don Quixote encounters fall in this trope, especially Sancho.
  • Wacky Wayside Tribe: The last chapters of the First Part are dedicated to solve a Romantic Plot Tumor, reading a Novel Within a Novel named The Ill-Advised Curiosity and to hear the tale of the Captive Captain, leaving Don Quixote as a mere spectator in his own book. In the Second Part Cervantes makes a Author's Saving Throw when Don Quixote opines:
    "...and I know not what could have led the author to have recourse to novels and irrelevant stories, when he had so much to write about in mine; no doubt he must have gone by the proverb 'with straw or with hay, etc.,' for by merely setting forth my thoughts, my sighs, my tears, my lofty purposes, my enterprises, he might have made a volume as large, or larger than all the works of El Tostado note  would make up".
  • Walking the Earth: With disastrous results every time there's a new "adventure".
  • Wanting Is Better Than Having:
  • What Would X Do?: Parodied when Don Quixote invokes Achilles in His Tent in the Sierra Morena, he asks himself what would two knights in shining armor do? The catch is that being a deconstruction, Don Quixote must choose between the Knight in Shining Armor played straight (Amadis cries and prays for days because his lady Oriana doesn’t want to see him anymore) and the Knight in Shining Armor deconstruction (Roland went mad and killed humans, animals and plants when he discovered princess Angelica slept with Medoro).
  • Where the Hell Is Springfield?: First line: "In a village of La Mancha, the name of which I have no desire to recall." It's even lampshaded in the very last chapter: Part II, chapter 74: "Such was the end of the Ingenious Gentleman of La Mancha, whose village Cide Hamete would not indicate precisely, in order to leave all the towns and villages of La Mancha to contend among themselves for the right to adopt him and claim him as a son, as the seven cities of Greece contended for Homer". Which, guess what, is what happened.
  • Wide-Eyed Idealist: This trope is severely deconstructed with Don Quixote: In the first part, Don Quixote cares more for fulfilling his fantasies than for anyone else. He is sure that the farmer Haduldo will keep his promise to stop flogging the boy Andrés, and that the Galley slaves he liberates will be grateful enough to do him a favor. (They're not). His actions make him the original Lord Error-Prone. In the second part is even worse: he really acts For Happiness, and after some scam-laden adventures that convince him he is a real Knight Errant, he must face the sad fact that he has not helped anyone, and therefore, all those Chivalric Romance tropes were Blatant Lies. This is so heartbreaking that he becomes Bored with Insanity and dies. Being called "Quixotic" is not always a good thing.
  • Windmill Crusader: Don Quixote is the trope namer, who will go down in literary history as the deluded self-proclaimed knight who mistook a bunch of windmills for wicked giants, and tried to attack one with his lance. This is only the most famous of many cases where his mind creates imaginary villains out of mundane or innocuous things, all because he is so eager to win glory through heroic deeds.
  • A Wizard Did It:
    • All over the place in the books Don Quixote reads, so naturally, when reality blatantly deviates from how he imagines it, he assumes that enchanters are behind it.
    • Much more literally, when the priest and the barber burn Don Quixote's books, they tell him that a wizard stole them. Don Quixote goes off to find the wizard.
  • Wrong Genre Savvy: Probably the Trope Maker. Don Quixote is severely delusional and believes he is in a Chivalric Romance. Sadly for him, This Is Reality. Hilarity Ensues.
  • Ye Olde Butchered English: The Spanish equivalent. In the original Spanish book, at least, Don Quijote uses outdated forms of speech and pronunciation, like maintaining the initial 'f' in words like 'fermosa' (hermosa), in an attempt to emulate the outdated forms of speech used on chivalry novels. The very name of the book itself is an example too: The 'x' in the name denotes an antiquated ortography for a very strong "h" phonem (similar as Scottish loch) and not 'eks'. It is written in Modern Spanish as 'j'. Thus don Quijote, (ki-ho-tey) not Quixote (quick-sot). The Spanish edition uses the modern ortography, Don Quijote.
  • You Watch Too Much X: Even when Quixote could be the Ur-Example and Trope Maker for this trope, in the novel this is a Unbuilt Trope: the Stock Phrase never appears in the novel, and Don Quixote is not Genre Savvy but Wrong Genre Savvy: When in some situation Don Quixote comments about how similar situation have happened in the tales he has read in his chivalry books, the people hearing him don't answer with "You read too much X". Even so, there are some examples that are very near to this situation, and the fact that Don Quixote read too much, and that drove him to believe that he was a knight errant, is the core of the novel, and is lampshaded by the narrator since the very beginning (Chapter I Part I).

 
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Alternative Title(s): Don Quijote, El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote De La Mancha, The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote Of La Mancha

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Wishbone's "Don Quixote"

Wishbone as Sancho Panza tries to dissuade Don Quixote from attacking windmills.

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