Who's Who in Don Quixote? Or an Approach to the Problem of Identity

Abstract

In his important study the Rise of the Novel Ian Watt observed a connection between the concentration on an individual's particular experience, which characterises the modem realistic novel, and the problem of the nature of personal identity, which was much debated among philosophers from the beginning of the eighteenth century.' He was admittedly making the usual assumption of English literary historians that the modem novel, if it can be said to have a discernible beginning, began with Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. However, the same connection may be observed in Don Quixote. Cervantes's novel even poses problems about the nature of personal identity which are closely related to some of those which have preoccupied philosophers from John Locke to A. J. Ayer. Major aspects of the complex problem of personal identity in the Quixote have been noted or examined by a number of Hispanist scholars, such as Ortega y Gasset, Leo Spitzer, Amdrico