The Balance of Power: A Struggle for Interpretation in Don Quixote

It is difficult to read more than one or two pages of Don Quijote de la Mancha without coming across an example of the union (or conflict) between the extraordinary and the mundane. Indeed, Cervantes uses this juxtaposition repeatedly as his principal comic device, generally at the expense of poor, mad Don Quijote, whose overzealous perception of the ordinary world around him drives the novel. At the same time, the squire Sancho Panza consistently comes …

…Quijote's story to go on for more than thirty chapters as it does - without his repeated misunderstandings, there would be no adventures. In other words, stepping outside the novel, Cervantes must allow Quijote's misinterpretations - and the historian's sympathetic narration of them - to drive the plot in order to show how silly they are, how pernicious fantastic works of fiction can be to one's rationality.