Roberto González Echevarría closes his Yale course on Cervantes' Don Quixote by examining how the novel's first part ends, an ending that seventeenth-century readers took as final since no second part yet existed. He argues the conclusion is already embedded in the prologue, which doubles as an epilogue for this meta-novel, and walks through the episodes that function as partial endings: Don Quixote's caging and the barber's contrived prophecy. He then unpacks the conversation among Don Quixote, the priest, and the canon of Toledo, the canon being the prologue's own ironic idle reader, which weighs the possibilities of chivalric romance against Aristotle's Poetics and takes aim at Lope de Vega's theatrical innovations. The lecture notes the irony that Cervantes was radically original in fiction yet conservative about drama, and closes with Don Quixote's return home, now rendered as an uncanny, unfamiliar place that deepens his madness.