Fighting Windmills: Encounters with Don Quixote - Book Report/Review Example

The reason for the popularity of Don Quixote lies in the fact that people of all ages find it easy to relate to the lead character. Other heroes perform great deeds, fight wars, achieve great things. They capture the public imagination for a while but the everyday man does not feel an affinity to them. This affinity is present in no short supply when faced with a man fighting the demons of his everyday life. All of us, every day, face a million small challenges that are to each of us, nothing short of the quests of the greatest heroes.

This "universality" of Don Quixote is well exemplified by comments such as those of Motteux, "Every man has something of Don Quixote in his humor", and of Dr. Johnson, "very few readers, amidst their mirth or pity, can deny that they have admitted visions of the same kind." [Skinner 1987]At a superficial level, Don Quixote may appear to be out of touch with reality but the simple truth of the matter is that his immense popularity through the ages bears witness to the fact that his character, with its inability to accept the world as it really is, strikes a chord with many readers.

It cannot be denied that "Don Quixote speaks to us and has inspired so many novelists that flourished after its publication because the hopes and doubts expressed in its pages, emblematic of Cervantes time, are universal. Indeed, today we are still enthralled by the same high hopes and tormented by the same nagging doubts." [Duran and Rogg 2006]The phrase "tilting at windmills" from Cervantes masterpiece has assumed an idiomatic status in the English language, being used to mean fighting an imaginary enemy.

The phrase derives from a scene in the book when Don Quixote takes windmills as giants and rides forth to battle them"just then they came in sight of thirty or forty windmills that rise from that plain. And no sooner did Don Quixote see them that he said to his squire, "Fortune is guiding our affairs better than we ourselves could have wished. Do you see over yonder, friend Sancho, thirty or forty hulking giants I intend to do battle with them and slay them? With their spoils we shall begin to be rich for this is a righteous war and the removal of so foulbrood from off the face of the earth is a service God will bless."