"Many people, not all of them Spanish, are on record as believing that 'Don Quixote' is the greatest prose fiction ever produced in the Western world. Certainly it is one of the few books a genuinely international critic would dare to group with 'The Dream of the Red Chamber' or 'The Tale of Genji' or 'The Mahabharata'. It epitomizes the spiritual world of European man at mid-career as 'The Odyssey' and 'The Iliad' do at his beginnings and as 'The Brothers Karamazov' does in his decline. . . . Don Quixote starts on his quest with his head full of phantasm. What he finds is his own identity, but he finds it in communion with others. He discovers what Don Quixote is really like by discovering that other people are like himself and that he is like them. The mystery that is slowly unveiled in the course of his complicated adventures is the mystery of the facts of life. . . . Possibly all great fictions deal with self-realization, with the integration of the personality. This is, in a special way, the subject of 'Don Quixote'. Even more than in the wise reveries of Montaigne, Cervantes in this golden book gives us the purest expression of humanism -- not just its message, but its special wisdom that can be found only in adventure in the manifold, inexhaustibly eventful ways of men." (Rexroth)
Don Quixote (Passages in Spanish and English)
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