Roberto González Echevarría continues his Yale lecture series on Cervantes' Don Quixote, working through chapters XXI to XXVI. He examines the episode of the corpse and its meditation on death and reality, the fulling hammers scene that deepens the bond between Quixote and Sancho, and the Mambrino's helmet episode as an early statement of perspectivism and doubt about the senses. The lecture centers on Ginés de Pasamonte, the galley slave and self-styled author, reading him as a figure for a new kind of writer emerging from lived experience rather than classical models. González Echevarría connects this to the birth of the picaresque genre and to Cervantes' awareness, voiced through Don Quixote himself, that his own adventures are being composed as the reader encounters them. Recorded for Yale's SPAN 300 in Fall 2009, part of the Open Yale Courses series.