DonQuixote堂吉诃德读后感.doc

Thoughts after reading of Don Quixote
Don Quixote is written by Miguel de Cervantes a famous writer of Spain. It has been around for four hundred years, and has inspired virtually every literary movement from the eighteenth-century picaresque 以歹徒为题材的to the most obscure模糊works of twenty-first century postmodernism. 后现代主义

The concept of the novel is simple: Alonso Quixano, landowner from La Mancha, is stricken with a fixation for books about knights and castles,wizards and maidens,dragons and giants, and generally any story having to do with fabulous adventures that never really happened. Driven mad by the inconsistencies of plot, character and philosophy that fill each volume of these seventeenth-century precursors to the fantasy novel, Quixano resolves to restore dignity to the lost profession of knight-errantry, named himself Don Quixote de La Mancha, assembles a rudimentary sword, suit of armor, and horse (the eternally-suffering-and-spavined Rocinante), and sets out into Spain in his quest for glory.
In return for this act of hysterical faith歇斯底里的信念, he finds violent innkeepers民宿, malevolent thieves, cynical shepherds, sadistic nobility, and even an inferior Quixote impostor.
The first few scenes involve Quixote alone against the contemporary world, but before a hundred pages have elapsed Cervantes introduces Sancho Panza, Quixote's gullible, bloated and homily-spouting squire, who in conjunction with Quixote provides the spark for endlessly bizarre discussions in which Quixote's heightened, insane conception of the world is brought crashing to earth by Sancho's sly pragmatism discussions which occasionally end with Quixote threatening to pummel Sancho in order to shut him up
Once joined together, it's very difficult to imagine Don Quixote and Sancho ever being split apart: the two are the original comic duo, locked into perpetually and mutually exclusive views of the world, and in and of themselves--whether Sancho is being asked to give himself hundreds of lashes in order to disenchant Quixote's swineherd love interest, Dulcinea, or whether Quixote is mixing a potion based on olive oil and bitter herbs that will, in theory, cure all of Sancho's Quixote-caused earthly wounds--the Knight and the Squire personifies the thematic conflict that propels the work.

In general, this is why Don Quixote remains one hell of a read--even today. The reader faces, in the same moment, an ideal view of the world (the world as enchanted, antiquated, idyllic) and the brutal facts of the actual world (the world as material, modern, loath to believe in knights.)
Quixote hacks at the belly of ogres in an inn basement, and is rewarded by a jet of wine in his face and a hefty bill for damages. He tries to rid the land of giants, and is spun, lance-first, by a powerful windmill he spears in the attempt. He attempts to liberate a statue of the Virgin Mary, which he believes to be a damsel in distress, from her captors, and in return is beaten up by priests.
Throughout, Sancho is there to say exactly what the reader is likely thinking--those aren't giants; Dulcinea isn't beautiful; none of this can be real--only to be rewarded with a lecture from Don Quixote about how he is beset by enchanters, who frustrate his every move by replacing the facts of his world, at the last moment, with devil's illusions that bear an uncomfortable resemblance to our own reality. It's a single joke repeated across a thousand pages, and yet it's strong enough to bring a laugh every time.
Quixote's insistence on his own madness in the face of innumerable arguments to the contrary, many of which take the form of cat scratches, cracked bones and missing teeth, makes him an interesting character because we know--or we think we know--that Quixote is just wrong. Yet, despite all of the pain he suffers in pursuit of that wrong, he continues to believe that he's right. So we read on page-after-page, waiting to see how much more the man who believes himself a knight is able to take before he gives in--whether, in the end, Quixote will give in at all.

We read not only for page-after-page, but for year-after-year, century-after-century, pulled by the cognitive dissonance that surrounds the knight like his own cloud of malicious enchanters恶意的附魔师. In the process, just as Quixote builds his castles from inns and criminal campfires, so we build castles of speculation from what we find in Cervantes's Spain, at once so brutally real and so dream-like, the realm of archetype and myth founded on dreary life. We, like Don Quixote, are driven to hallucinate by what might be, in the end, just a very good story.
With Don Quixote, Cervantes has accomplished an enduring act of literary alchemy: just as Quixote is combined with Sancho, so is fantasy combined with reality, the eternal with the everyday, and like the combination of matter and anti-matter物质和反物质, the explosion of aesthetic爆炸审美power is, in magnitude, infinite, propelling readers推进器from the earth--at first facing inward at what was left behind on the page, then, forgetting the earth, outward into meaning--farther and farther toward the dream-like stars.