Cervantes Motivation for Writing Don Quixote Essay -- Biography Biogr

Cervantes indigence for Writing Don Quixote Miguel de Cervantes greatest literary work, Don Quixote, maintains an enduring, if somewhat sterile imold age in the popular culture the tale of the obsessed ennoble and his clownish squire who embark on a faith-driven, adventure-seeking quest. However, although this childlike set forth has survived since the novels inception, and spawned such universally known concepts or images as quixotic noble-mindedness and charging headlong at a group of giants which are actually windmills, Cervantes motivating for musical composition Don Quixote form an untold story. Looking at new-made fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Spain from the viewpoint of a Renaissance man, Cervantes came to dislike many aspects of the age in which he lived, and decided to satirize what he saw as its failings however, throughout the writing of what would plough his most famous work, Cervantes was torn by a philosophical conflict which pervaded the Renaissance and its intellectuals--the clash of faith and reason. When Cervantes began writing Don Quixote, the most direct target of his satirical intentions was the chivalric romance. He makes this incur clear in his own preface to the novel, stating that ..his sole aim in writing..is to invalidate the authority, and ridicule the absurdity of those books of chivalry, which have, as it were, fascinated the eyeball and judgment of the world, and in particular of the vulgar. Immediately after the beginning of the novel, he demonstrates some of the ridiculous and unbelievable writing of these books as Alonso Quixano--the man who decides to become the knight Don Quixote, after going mad from reading also many of these romances--sits in his study, tirelessly poring over his belo... ...r (Magill 330). In Part II of the novel, however, Don Quixote becomes less of a sadly comic figure, and more lofty (331) after he stoically faces down a lion, leading Sancho to channelise his masters previous title-- dub of the Rueful Countenance--to Knight of the Lions. Although the tale told in Don Quixote, the account of an idealist who embarks on a seemingly impossible quest to rid society of injustice, has assumed archetypal importance for what it reveals of the human mind and emotions (Person 81), there is another story which remains hidden between the pages of the novel what was Cervantes original intent in writing, and how that simple goal--a humorous parody of chivalric romances--eventually led to the literary embodiment of a tremendous philosophical debate whether to let the perception of truth be dominated by faith, or by reason.