Cervantes, Don Quijote

Cervantes' genius never ceases to amaze me. I will comment on two points that always catch my attention: First, his use of the literary device so called 'the frame;' and second, his use of antitheses. By introducing the frame of a found manuscript , Cervantes quickly begs the reader for his suspension of disbelief to the fantastic, fabulous, wild stories, and events that will befall the last of the knight errants: Don Quijote of La Mancha. According to Cervantes, the story isn't really a story (fiction) but a history of a Spanish hidalgo whose adventures are recorded in the annals of the region called La Mancha. The narrator is not a common storyteller like Scheherazade, raconteurs like Chaucer and Bocaccio, or interested witnesses like Nelly Dean and Mr. LockwoodWood who tell Heathcliff's story in Wuthering Heights. No. The writer is an Arab historian named Cide Hamete Benengeli, of whom Cervantes has this to say: "If any objection can be raised regarding the truth of this one, it can only be that its author was Arabic, since the people of that nation are very prone to telling falsehood, but because they are such great enemies of ours, it can be assumed that he has given us too little rather than too much." Cervantes declared that his success as a writer was due in great part to his mastery of the use of anthithesis, a rhetorical figure that he uses throughout the long narrative. The translation by Edith Grossman is so far the best I have encountered. It is fresh and faithful--unsurpassed. The writing techniques I employ in this article are all explained in Mary Duffy's writing manual: Toolbox for Writers Augustine, City of God Austen J, Pride and Prejudice Austen J, "Marriage Proposals and Me" Austen J, Emma Borges, The Aleph C. Bronte, Jane Eyre Burroughs E,Tarzan Cervantes, Don Quijote Chaucer, Wife of Bath Coelho P,The Alchemist Coyle H, They Are Soldiers Dante, New Life Dickens C, David Copperfield Dostoevsky, Crime&Punishment ConanDoyle,Hound of Baskervilles Dubner S, Superfreakonomics DuMaurier D, Rebecca Ellis B. E. American Psycho Fitzgerald S, Great Gatsby Flaubert G, Madame Bovary Fleming I,Doctor No Freud S, Leonardo Da Vinci Friedan B, Feminine Mystique GarciaMarquez, Of Love & OtherDemons GarciaMarquez,OneHundredYrs Guerrero M,ThePoison Pill Grass G, The Tin Drum Harris T, Hannibal Rising Heidegger M,House of Being Ishiguro K, Remains of The Day Johnson S,Rasselas Kafka,Metamorphosis Kosinski J, The Painted Bird Lee H,To Kill a Mockingbird McBain Ed,Gutter and Grave Murakami H,Wind-Up Bird Chronicle Nabokov V, Lolita Meyer, S, Twilight Ortega,Dehumanization of Art Poe E A, Gordon Pym Prose F, Reading Like a Writer Rushdie S,Midnight Children Sabatini R, Scaramouche Spark M, Prime of Miss Brodie Stendhal, Red and Black Sterne L,Tristram Shandy Stevenson R, Dr.Jekyll & Mr.Hyde Stoker B, Dracula Thackeray W,History of Pendennis Tolstoy L, Anna Karenina Trollope A, Autobiography Unamuno M, Tragic Sense of Life Voltaire, Candide Webb J, Fields of Fire Wharton E, The House of Mirth Woolf V, To The Lighhouse The secrets of 'no-doze' prose: Mary Duffy's Sentence Openers Image via Wikipedia Lindsey Vonn Back to main page

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