
Don Quixote, Part I: Chapters XXXVI-LII
Roberto González Echevarría continues his Yale course on Cervantes with a session covering the final chapters of Part One of Don Quixote. He opens on patterns of return and repetition that give the novel density, including the galley slaves, the boy Andrés, and the postprandial speech on arms and letters. He argues that Don Quixote's madness exposes the arbitrariness of law and provokes irrational behavior in those around him, then turns to the captive's tale, where religious conversion cuts across social barriers in a Renaissance plot of reconciled opposites. González Echevarría frames Don Quixote as the first fugitive-hero of Western fiction, a figure drawn from legal archives who commits real crimes while acting out chivalric fantasy, yet who also serves as an instrument of Providence. The lecture closes with reflections on how Part One ends.