![]() He talks to him as if he were actually a knight an invites him inside his (snicker) castle. Eventually, the keeper of the inn shows up and decides to have pity on Don Quixote.But when they see his grizzled old face, they realize that he's probably just a crazy person and start laughing at him. A couple of ladies see him and start to run away because of his armor (they probably think he's a medieval cop or something).But what the heck, his brain tells him that he's actually arriving at a castle with a huge moat and drawbridge. As the day draws to a close, Don Quixote decides that he should try to find an inn (or better yet, an enchanted castle) where he can spend his evening.Don Quixote rides around all day but doesn't really stumble onto any grand adventures.Now that he has all his stuff together, Don Quixote rides off into the countryside so he can do good in the world and be a hero.He also decides to rename her Dulcinea del Toboso because it sounds more like a princess's name than whatever her name actually is. ![]() He's never actually seen the girl, but he's heard that she's pretty enough. So just like that, he decides that he's going to love a girl from the nearby town of Toboso. According to the rules of those knight books he likes so much, all he now needs is a woman to fall in love with and to admire from afar. Okay, so now Don Quixote has some armor, a noble steed, and a name for himself.There's no direct English translation for the name "Rocinante," but in Spanish, "Rocín" means a "hack" or a "work horse," and "ante" means "before, used to be, former." So loosely translated, Rocinante means something like "used to be a work horse" or "former hack" (We see you, Miguel. Why Rocinante? Just because he thinks it sounds cool? Well, that might be why the character Don Quixote chooses this name, but if you look a little closer, you can see Miguel de Cervantes is having some fun with Spanish wordplay.For kicks, he also decides to rename the horse Rocinante. He's kind of living in a post-fact world at this point. But when the great Don Quixote (that's our old dude) looks at this sorry excuse for a horse, he sees a noble stallion. Next, the old dude goes to look at his horse, which is basically an old bag of bones-just like the old dude himself, really.He doesn't have a proper helmet, so he just makes one out of some thin wood that he ties to a metal hat. The first thing he does is go into a closet and fish out an old suit of armor that belongs to his great-grandfather.But as the dude gets older and more bored, he get really, really into his books until one day, poof, he decides that he wants to become a knight himself.It turns out that in 17th-century Spain, nothing warded off boredom more than a good rousing tale about knights and dragons and all that stuff you're still likely to see in movies.In other words, he had nothing to do all day but try to amuse himself and fight off boredom. We hear that there was once a dude who had quite a bit of money and never had to work because he was getting on in years.The author won't name the exact village, because he's worried that everyone will try to claim the hero of this book as their own native son. We pan in on a village in the Spanish region of La Mancha.So, with that in mind, Cervantes says that he wants to give all of our favorite adventure stories a little dose of reality….What would actually happen, Cervantes asks, if a person tried to dress up as a knight and seek out adventures like the ones in chivalry books? That person would be considered crazy and get him- or herself locked up.He was annoyed, though, by how these books never actually focused on any real-world concerns or consequences. And why is that, you ask? He wrote this book because stories about dragon-slaying knights (or "books of chivalry") were by far the most popular form of literature during his time.But we've decided to include it here because Miguel de Cervantes explains point-blank why he wrote Don Quixote. It's not always necessary to include an author's preface in the summary of a book.
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