O celebrated Author! O fortunate Don Quixote! O famous Dulcinea! O comical Sancho Panza! Together and separately may you live an infinite number of years, bringing pleasure and widespread diversion to the living.
—Cervantes, Don Quixote, II, 40

Don Quixote is the mother of all novels. Or as Lionel Trilling put it, “All prose fiction is a variation on the theme of Don Quixote.” That theme is the clash between what we think, or imagine, or wish is so, and what is so. The clash is a matter of differing perspectives: personal, intellectual, class, cultural, historical. The consciousness of perspective—that I see things this way and you see things that way—is a form of self-consciousness. It develops in the riper stages of a civilization, if it ever develops. Don Quixoteis one marker of that development in ours. Perspective consciousness is an advance in humanization, a deeper awareness of who we are and how we differ in our understandings. Don Quixote sees a lot of wicked giants, Sancho Panza sees windmills. A mild man otherwise, but pugnacious when an “adventure” presents itself, the knight charges. Horse and rider are swept up by a whirling van and tumbled to the ground, ignominiously, ridiculously. Sancho is proven right. But the Don is immovable in his chivalric madness: Frestón the enchanter turned the giants into mills so as to rob him of the glory of defeating them. To the ridiculousness of his delusion and its consequences is added