Don quixote summary shmoop poem

Don quixote savouring the classics summary

When we first meet Don Quixote, he's a fairly wealthy older gentleman with a little too much time on his hands. His favorite thing to do with his free time is read adventure books that he takes to be historically accurate. One day, his mind snaps. He decides that he wants to be a knight from one of his books, so he saddles up his horse and goes out in quest of adventure.

His first foray into the world of knighthood goes badly. It's not long before he's totally laid up with injuries and carried back home. Soon after he recovers, though, he gets himself a sidekick named Sancho Panza and sets out again for adventure. The action in this book isn't so much "rising action" as it is a constant barrage of weird antics and crazy violence.

But then again, you can't expect a constant build-up of tension from a book that's around a thousand pages in most editions. Don Quixote and Sancho get themselves into all kinds of trouble, but the overall feeling is more like watching episodes of a long-running TV series than watching a single two-hour movie. He meets Don Quixote on a beach one day and challenges him to a duel, saying that the loser will have to do whatever the winner says.

This effectively ends Don Quixote's career as a knight, and the Don is inconsolable afterward. On his way home, Don Quixote runs into a few new adventures, like getting pulled back into the castle of a sadistic Duke and Duchess. But at this point, all of this stuff just seems like filler on the author's part. We all know Don Quixote's career as a knight is over, and that he now dreams of becoming a musical shepherd in his free time.