SOURCE: Parr, James A. “Some Narratological Problems in Don Quixote: Five Instances.” In Studies in Honor of Donald W. Bleznick, pp. 127-42. Newark, Del.: Juan de la Cuesta, 1995.

In the following essay, Parr examines narrative technique in Don Quixote.

It is no exaggeration to say that the plot, the main characters, the interpolated stories, and the complementarities among main and accessory actions have, together, dominated critical discourse on Don Quixote. It is also fair to say that the telling of the tale has generally taken a subordinate position to what in Anglo-American critical parlance is traditionally called “showing.” In the terms Plato used some centuries ago, mimesis has received more attention than diegesis.

Two chapters of my Don Quixote: An Anatomy of Subversive Discourse were designed to demonstrate how telling traces, and sometimes coopts, the main plot line of the text—from the perspective, that is, of one...