SOURCE: Durán, Manuel. “From Fool's Gold to Real Gold: Don Quixote and the Golden Helmet.” In Studies in Honor of Donald W. Bleznick, pp. 17-31. Newark, Del.: Juan de la Cuesta, 1995.

In the following essay, Durán maintains that chapter twenty-one of the first part of Don Quixote, which deals with the adventure of Mambrino's helmet, is a microcosm of the entire novel.

Reading Don Quixote is like biting into a plum pudding: some chapters are more rewarding, more full of juicy bits of fruit than others. Chapter XXI of Part I, “which treats of the high and richly rewarded adventure of Mambrino's helmet, together with other things that happened to our invincible knight,”¹ can be praised on two scores: it is interesting in and by itself, and moreover it offers the reader a microcosm of the novel as a whole. In it we find action and...