Basic Patterns and Themes of the Dialogue

In the intervals between adventures the knight and his squire talk, and their conversations make up a significant proportion of the novel, representing a radical shift in the development of narrative fiction from incident to dialogue and from action to character. Cervantes's motive in giving the conversations such prominence is clearly attested by those who overhear them and comment on them (e.g. II, 2; p. 641, and II, 7; p. 684): he comes to see the two central figures as extraordinary characters, whose delusions and mannerisms, including their changing attitude towards each other and the world around, constitute the main focus of interest of his story. In Part II, this conception of them supersedes, without totally supplanting, the original motive for pairing Sancho with his master: parody of the knight/squire relationship in chivalry books.

A related, if implicit, motive for the introduction of Sancho in Chapter 7 is the need to complement the solitary, self-absorbed protagonist of the first sally, solemnly engrossed in imitative role-play, with a comic foil of a quite different kind, and the rustic nitwit (bobo) of sixteenth-century comedy provided a convenient model. Sancho embodies the stock traits of this type: foolishness, forgetfulness, talkativeness, greed, cowardice, sloth, proneness to solecisms. His arrival in the story logically causes the exchanges with Don Quixote to slot into the standard patterns of master/servant dialogue in sixteenth-century comedy, a high/low antiphonal in which the nobleman's lyrical effusions and posturings of love and honour are met by the commoner's quips, complaints, objections, and concern for skin and creature comforts. In Fernando de Rojas's comedy-in-prose La Celestina and its continuations, and in the plays of Lope de Rueda, Juan de Timoneda and the early Lope de Vega, one finds fragments of dialogue that closely prefigure the attitudes of Cervantes's famous pair (Close, 1981). Another early model, though outside the theatre, is the relation of young Lazarillo to his third master, the snobbish, down-at-heels squire, in the third tratado or chapter of the first picaresque novel, Lazarillo de Tormes (1554).

Such are the basic models of Cervantes's conception of his pair of heroes, though in the course of the story they are augmented by a host of others.