/lit/ - Literature

>>4642527
How so? Quixote was doomed to fail from the beginning, any good that has come of his adventures has been purely accidental. His willingness to return home after losing the duel is a result of his strict (and misguided) code of honour, but unfortunately his family and friends didn't realize that the delusion was the only thing keeping the poor old bastard going. It's really quite a beautiful ending and I can't imagine it ending in any other way.

How long did it take you OP? Every time i try and start I pussy out.

>>4642527
idealism giving way to realism, maturity; keep your fucking head out of the clouds and be an adult

>>4642572
That's actually quite a good way of looking at it; I suppose my initial reaction was to view Quixote's sudden death as Cervantes's way of preempting more fanfic, and to view his abrupt deconversion from knight-errantry as making a separate point.

>>4642573
About a month. For reasons too complicated to be worth explaining, I don't know exactly when I began the book.

>>4642591
If that's true, why did reality kill him? Say what you want about the other characters, but Quixote was only truly happy when he was deluded. Obviously he is a case taken in the extreme, but I'd argue that delusion isn't always a bad thing.

>>4642591
You think so? If Don Quixote had never gone mad, he presumably would have just spent the remainder of his life reading and puttering around instead of having weird adventures.

>>4642601
That's definitely part of the reason he was killed off, but to assume that it was the only reason is to discredit Cervantes as an artist.

>>4642613
A little off-topic, but I loved the idea of Don Quixote trying to live according to the tropes adopted by works of fiction purely for convenience.

I think this book wouldn't have made as much sense to me before the Internet.

>>4642623
In my defense, as I've said, I haven't had that long yet to chew it over.

I also haven't read much literature from the period, so sometimes it's hard to know if there are literary conventions I'm unaware of being used (or subverted).

Consider the original context. After Part I was written, it was a tremendous success. One of the side effects of its success was the fact that many other writers grabbed up the character and cranked out sequels of their own. Cervantes was in a position of countering all of this in establishing the true canonical continuation of the story, so he was compelled to write Part II. The way he concluded Part II was to a large extent a proactive step toward avoiding more of the same.