The Genealogy of the Novel from theOdysseytoDon Quijote

Abstract

Cervantes carefully planned the architecture of Part One of Don Quijote. The narrative of its hero's wanderings may appear random in sequence and endlessly deployable, but in fact it is shaped by an elaborate design. The book tips off the reader to the presence of this design in chapter 26, the midpoint of its fifty-two chapters. Here Don Quijote decides not to imitate the madness of Orlando in Ariosto's Orlando furioso and to think only the best of the chaste Dulcinea: she is today as her mother brought her into the world, and I should do her a grave injury were I to imagine otherwise and go crazy after the manner of Orlando the Furious [que se esta hoy corno la madre que la pario; y hariale agravio manifiesto, si imaginando otra cosa della, me volviese loco de aquel genero de locura de Roldân el furioso] (291; 255). * Mad though he is, Don Quijote resolves not to go mad in the manner of Orlando. The central placement of this episode owes its model to the Orlando furioso, for Ariosto's Orlando goes mad out of jealousy and disillusionment at the end of canto 23, exactly at the midpoint of that forty-six canto poem. Paying homage to his Italian predecessor, Cervantes marks the center of his own book.