Don Quixote was a madman who charged windmills, slaughtered sheep, and mistook prostitutes and crooks for maidens and noblemen.
400 years later, his story remains one of the greatest and most widely read novels of all time.
Why?
This novel not only revolutionized literature, but captured a fundamental revolution in human nature itself. It was written at one of the great transitional epochs of history— a time of unprecedented change, technological innovation, and discoveries of the “New World,” but also a time of profound uncertainty.
Mankind was moving out of what we now call the “medieval era” — a world unified socially, culturally, politically, and theologically by the Church — and into the “modern world.”
This change did not only bring the aforementioned technological innovations, but a great tension too. Man began to doubt his certainty about life’s meaning, his place in the cosmos, and even his understanding of his own nature.
In other words, Don Quixote shows us the birth of what it means to be a “modern man”—and how to navigate a world increasingly defined by skepticism, uncertainty, and technological innovation.
You can read this novel as both a celebration of this “new frontier,” where man can reinvent himself, and a lamentation of the old world’s decay — a decay that shatters mankind’s confidence in his ability to live a meaningful life.
Ultimately, the core essence of Don Quixote is tragedy, a lamentation at the death of the old world and the loss of wonder that accompanies it.
And yet, inside this tragedy are the seeds of how modern man might one day “return to his roots,” rediscovering the wonder, grandeur, and inherent joy of a medieval cosmology, reconciled with the progress, innovation, and material prosperity of the modern world.
Today, we’ll see how…
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Delusions of Grandeur
So what can we learn from a fictional 17th century delusional knight?
Let’s start by considering why Don Quixote went insane in the first place.
We first learn that Don Quixote was a hidalgo (a poor rural nobleman) living a humble and quiet life on a farm. He’s a gentle soul and a quiet idealist who buries his face in books on medieval chivalry. Yet it appears he read a little too many books:
“Our gentleman became so immersed in his reading that he spent whole nights from sundown to sunup poring over his books, until, finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.
He filled his imagination with everything he had read… and had come to believe that all these fictitious happenings were true; they were more real to him than anything else in the world.”
Books made Quixote insane, but there was intention behind his insanity. Quixote’s madness is a spiritual rebellion. His love of chivalry was a love of greatness grounded in virtue. Knights were called to lay down their life to protect the innocent and aspire to a life of fortitude, courage, honor above all. Yet the quiet poverty of Quixote’s real life was insufficient to channel his ambitions. Rather than settling for mediocrity, he wills the medieval into existence:
For the rest of his journey, Quixote will see castles instead of inns, maidens instead of prostitutes, and monsters to be slayed in place of mundane farm life.
Yet we’re not just called to laugh at Quixote. Insane though he is, Cervantes suggests there’s a hidden wisdom in Quixote’s madness. The protagonist doesn’t evoke mockery, but pity. Don Quixote connects you to an essence of the human spirit that is pure, primal, and good.
As we will see, the purity of Don Quixote’s heart is gravely missing in the modern world.
The Dangers of Realism
Don Quixote’s squire, Sancho Panza, is the perfect foil to Quixote. Sancho is a realist in every sense of the word. He’s pragmatic and sees the world as it is. While this helps ground Sancho in reality, we also see that there is a grave shortcoming in his worldview too.
To put it simply, Sancho is small-souled when we first meet him. He lives a passive existence of silent desperation. His imagination is constrained by the immediate realities of his life, and his ambitions rarely extend beyond material comfort.
Though Don Quixote aspires to great things and fails because of his lofty vision, Sancho sadly aspires to little at all. He’s no hero because he has not yet learned to imagine himself as one. He merely accepts the drab status quo of reality, despite his unhappiness as an impoverished farmer.
Sancho also mirrors the “sanity,” of Spain in the present day. Its populace is cynical, cold, and hard-hearted. They too reject the grandiose dreamy nature that Don Quixote aspires towards.
This is precisely what Quixote rebels against in his madness. He sees a modernizing Europe gutting its spiritual soul, and he refuses to live a life of quiet passivity that would see him fade into the abyss of a meaningless life.
Quixote and Sancho’s partnership then, shows the soul of modern man divided. Quixote is all imagination, Sancho all common-sense. One man is great-souled but insane, the other a realist whose life is sparse and shallow. They need each other.
This becomes clear when Don Quixote and Sancho Panza face their greatest and most famous rival, the legendary windmills.
Defeated by Giants
As Don Quixote sets out on his quest to be a noble knight, with Sancho Panza by his side, the two encounter a valley of windmills. Don Quixote, in his insanity, however, sees something entirely different — giants are invading Spain!
“Look out Sancho! Our country is being invaded!” Don Quixote screams.
Mounted on his horse with a lance in hand, he makes a furious rush for the windmills before Sancho can stop him. Quixote gives a shout and slashes his lance through the rotating windmill, only to be tossed off his horse with a crash.
After wiping the dust off, he gets to his feet, looks at the “giant,” and gasps:
“Look Sancho! Some necromancer has turned the army of giants into windmills!”
This short exchange captures the heart of the novel. For 1,000 pages, Quixote and Sancho go on adventures that follow this framework. Quixote’s imagination misreads a situation, he fights an imaginary villain, and leaves a path of destruction in his wake, while Sancho Panza follows along powerless to stop him.
The result is a comedic story, but also a tragic one. Despite Don Quixote’s noble intentions, he fails to do good. Instead he meets strife, scorn, and mockery wherever he goes. Ironically, he often leaves the world worse than where he finds it… yet he’s still a hero.
If there’s any hope in the story, it’s in this fact here:
Cervantes insists that there is something heroic in those of a noble heart who continue striving toward the good, no matter how much they may falter. Quixote failed to save chivalry, but in daring to fight a doomed quest in the face of modern Europe, his life story was one of silent beauty. Over time, the cynicism of the world breaks him, and he dies disillusioned, but it’s in the heap of his brokenness that our pity is most evoked.
The novel ends not with a full endorsement of Quixote’s insanity, but a plea to faith. To aspire to great adventures like he did.
It’s only fitting that Quixote has a true heir on his death bed. Sancho, by his side, promises to continue the adventures in Quixote’s place. The pragmatic squire, under Quixote’s lead, learned what it means to dare, and will carry the torch from here.
The Adventure Continues?
The real warning of the story is not Don Quixote’s insanity, but Sancho Panza’s passivity. What Cervantes saw in 17th century Spain was a modernizing Europe that abandoned the spiritual ethos that was the soul of civilization. A world that replaced mythology, piety, and thumos with utility, practicality, and a hard-hearted realism.
In this sense, the real hero is also Sancho. By the story’s end, he maintains his realism but learns Quixote’s idealism. In carrying the torch, he vows to be great-souled, but one grounded in the world.
The true spiritual rebellion then, is the man who learns to see the world as it is, like Sancho, but who loves the world for what it could be, like Don Quixote.
To do this is to live a life of greatness grounded in virtue, even in a mundane world that has forgotten how to dream.
I am 100% reader-supported. This newsletter is free, but if you’re able to support, please consider a paid membership — it helps my mission of sharing Truth, Beauty and Goodness with maximal reach
As a paid member, you’ll get:
Two full essays a week
Access to all recordings (past & future) of my Great Books lectures on this publication
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Thank you for this essay. I’m currently reading Don Quixote and this viewpoint is quite a helpful lens to consider the story through.
Great analysis, such a wonderful book!❤️