Roberto González Echevarría continues his Yale course on Cervantes with a session on Don Quixote's early chapters. He identifies two overarching plots in the novel, the story of its own writing and the story of the mad hidalgo, and compares Cervantes' layered narrative distancing to Velazquez's Las Meninas, where multiple incomplete perspectives and an oblique authorial presence expose the limits of human knowledge. He then turns to two episodes: the goatherds, whose kindness bridges Don Quixote's imagined ideal world and the real world regardless of social rank, and the story of Marcela and Grisostomo, which lays out their socioeconomic circumstances while defending Marcela's free will. The lecture is part of Yale's open Spanish 300 course on Don Quixote, recorded in Fall 2009, and runs through close reading of specific chapters with reference to painting and social structure in early modern Spain.