The Case of Alonso Quijano

No one ever asks what prompted Alonso Quijano, the legendary Don Quixote, to read so much fantasy literature in his late forties. We know he once infamously tilted at a windmill in his rusty armor on his old nag -- just one of a series of strange misadventures on his illusory quest -- because of what he read in that literature, and the prodigious doses in which he read it. It is generally known from Cervantes' great novel that Quijano, an impoverished Hidalgo of the village of La Mancha, went mad from excessive reading in a genre unsuited to reality. But we know almost nothing of his back story, save for what can be inferred from his status, age, and accoutrements. He is simply "one of those gentlemen with a lance in the lance-rack, an ancient shield, a skinny old horse, and a fast greyhound." Do we need to know more? Probably not. Alonso Quijano is more recognizable to us through the things he owns than through a description of his past.

Which does not mean he has no past. What caused him then to devote all his waking hours to chivalric romances? Perhaps if we turn our gaze to the unused lance on its rack, the rusting shield festooned with cobwebs, and the old charger, we might understand that old gentleman more clearly. They are the traces of his noble lineage, the relics of a would-be knight errant whose own chanson de geste is sounded in his mind, a mind more expansive and clamorous with every novel he touches. Can you hear his song? It's becoming more audible as it becomes less reasonable. But it's no less reasonable than it is intensely satisfying, for Alonso Quijano's world to this moment has been a of tedium, disappointment, and resentment. He is at last becoming the hero of his own longed-for narrative, a hero of his time and ours, and the world around him seems to be changing for him -- dragons and giants are materializing across the land, notorious brigands are creeping off yellowing pages, fair ladies and duchesses are appearing in castle towers.

After setting aside the last book he will ever read, Alonso Quijano puts out the candle, lays himself on his straw-filled bed, and thinks of a new name with which to meet this new world. Before he falls asleep, he will murmur to himself a name as fitting to him as it is unusual and famous to the rest of us: Don Quixote.