Don Quixote: A Manual for Madness

Cervantes’s Don Quixote is about a man who engineers his own reality. Inspired by his excessive reading, Alonso Quixano wakes up one day and decides to become a character in his very own tale of chivalry. He creates a makeshift suit of armor, mounts his pony, and declares himself Don Quixote de La Mancha. He became, in the words of his critics, a ‘living anachronism’, a ‘madman’, and the laughing stock of Cervantes’s satire.