Unlike Faust, the character Don Quixote was not based on an actual historical person. There has been a little talk of real-life originals, such as Alonso Quijada, Cervantes's wife's uncle, who may have believed that the romances of chivalry were true. But there has been no agreement among scholars, and any firm identification is improbable. The hero of El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha – The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha – published in 1605 and 1615, almost certainly had no real-life original; and yet, like all myths, that of Don Quixote has taken on a very simple form in the popular consciousness. It is mainly with how this form reflects some of the major values and conflicts of modern Western civilization that we are concerned.

THE FIRST EXPEDITION

A poor hidalgo (that is, a member of the lowest order of the Spanish nobility), whose surname is Quixada, Quesada, Quexana, or Quixano – the narrator claims not to know – and whose age is “bordering on fifty,” lives in a village in La Mancha. In the times when he has nothing else to do, “which was mostly all the year round,” we are told, he gives himself up “to reading of books of chivalry.” It becomes an obsession. He sells off “many an acre of tillage land to buy books of chivalry” and so deeply commits his imagination to the belief that all these inventions and fancies are true that “to him no history in the world was better substantiated” (p.26).