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Part 2, Chapter 1
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Don Quixote, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Truth and Lies
Literature, Realism, and Idealism
Madness and Sanity
Intention and Consequence
Self-Invention, Class Identity, and Social Change
Summary
Analysis
The two concerned women are trying to stop Sancho Panza from coming into the house, worried that he will remind Quixote of his old mischief. He comes in at Quixote’s request, and the priest and barber wonder where the knight and squire’s shared madness, their “fabric of absurdities,” will lead them. the priest notes that the master’s “madness” and the squire’s “foolishness” are somehow complementary and mutually necessary.
The priest refers rightly to Quixote and Sancho’s interdependence. At the beginning of the book, Quixote seems to be the mind and Sancho the body; hence “madness” (a blindness to earthly, bodily life) and “foolishness” (a blindness to the life of ideas).
Themes
Sancho and Quixote are also discussing their complementarity: Quixote explains to Sancho that master and servant are part of one body, so that when one is injured the other feels pain as well. Quixote asks Sancho about his reputation in the village, and Sancho tells him most people consider him insane, though brave and funny. Quixote takes these news quite well, explaining that all great heroes had fatal flaws. Sancho also tells him he heard word of a book called The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha, written by Cide Hamete Brinjalcurry (as Sancho remembers it), which describes all the adventures of their first two sallies in great detail.
But as the book progresses, and as their friendship deepens and changes them, Sancho helps Quixote acquire a body and Quixote helps Sancho acquire a mind – or at least that’s how the two feel; in reality, they are merely helping one another make use of these somewhat latent faculties. They are deeply grateful to one another; nothing is quite so lost as when it’s already yours, but somehow out of order.
Themes
