SOURCE: De Armas Wilson, Diana. “‘Ocean Chivalry’: Issues of Alterity in Don Quixote.” Colby Quarterly 32, no. 4 (December 1996): 220-35.

In the following essay, de Armas Wilson explores the relationship between Don Quixote and the “quixotic” Spanish conquerors of the books of chivalry and shows how Cervantes's knight-errant does not aspire to but rather mimics the conquistadors of the Golden Age of Spain.

Although Don Quixote stridently identifies himself with the fictional figures of his favorite books—chivalric heroes such as Lancelot or Amadís or Renaldo de Montalbán—he has of late been assimilated, in studies of spiraling scholarly confidence, to the historical figures of the conquistadores. One critic claims that it is easy for the twentieth-century reader to see Don Quixote as “a comic incarnation” of “the conquistador mentality of Golden Age Spain” (Skinner 54). Another calls Cervantes's hero an “aspiring” and even “divinely inspired” conqueror, a figure...