SOURCE: El Saffar, Ruth S. “The Dynamics of Character-Author-Reader Interaction in Don Quixote.” In Distance and Control in Don Quixote : A Study in Narrative Technique, pp. 15-44. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: North Carolina Studies in Romance Languages and Literatures, 1975.

In the following essay, El Saffar examines how Don Quixote is built around the tripartite nature of its characters as they function at different points in the roles of character, narrator, and spectator.

1. General Considerations for Don Quixote as a Whole

Don Quixote, in addition to being a novel about a man who made himself a knight in imitation of the books of chivalry on which his imagination had thrived for many years, is a collection of short stories, poems, and literary and heroic discourses. Although Don Quixote and his squire Sancho Panza receive the greater share of their author's attention, puzzling, seemingly un-integrated episodes in the novel remain...