Don Quixote 1-9

For this post, I'd like you to pick two scenes in which you see Don Quixote as a radical character within the novel thus far. What do you find radical about Don Quixote? Why? What do you think the text states about him as a character?

As always, I'm looking for your own ideas and analyses.

(On a related note, you may want to look up the term "quixotic" and see to which people it has been applied).

Don Quixote is radical because of his "madness". He mistakes common place objects for things that are far more grandeur. For example, he mistakes an inn for a castle after becoming weary of traveling in search chivalrous wrongs to right. "And since whatever our adventurer thought, saw or imagined seemed to him to be as it was in the books he'd read, as soon as he saw the inn he took it for a castle with its four towers and their spires of shining silver, complete with its drawbridge and its deep moat and all the other accessories that such castles commonly boast." (Pg. 32)

So, not only is his madness radical, but the imagination it expresses furthers how radical he is perceived to be by other characters, such as the prostitutes he mistakes for nobility near the same inn, who don't understand why a strange man in a cardboard visor is referring to them as maidens or how to address Don Quixote without laughing.

"The girls had been peering at him and trying to make out his face, hidden behind the ill-made visor; but when they heard themselves called maidens, a term so much at odds with their profession, they couldn't help but contain their laughter." (Pg. 32)