
Don Quixote, Part II: Chapters LXXI-LXXIV (cont.)
Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria closes his Yale course on Cervantes' Don Quixote with a lecture on the author's late work and death. He turns to two of the Exemplary Stories: The Deceitful Marriage, which opens with a wedding and works backward to unravel a union that was never legitimate, and The Dogs Colloquy, a picaresque tale in which a dog narrates its own life while skirting outright fantasy. Gonzalez Echevarria connects both stories to the reading strategies Cervantes built into the Quixote itself, then brings in Kafka's parable The Truth about Sancho Panza and Borges' Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote to show how later writers kept rereading Cervantes. The lecture ends by tracing parallels between Cervantes' own death, his dedication to Persiles, and the deaths of Don Quixote and Alonso Quijano, closing out the course on a note of mortality and farewell.