RUINING THE WORK OF TIME

At the beginning of the second book in Don Quixote, Quixote is recovering from his mad adventures in Book One. He spends the time in conversation and other innocent amusements with his two friends, the barber and the priest. In the course of their dialogue, as Cervantes tells his readers, the three men

All three men, in a sense, are acting Quixotic here; they are dwelling on an illusion. But this is a humanist rather than a chivalrous illusion. The premise is philosophic and amelioristic rather than egoistic and nostalgic. As the novel, in its second part, is becoming more self-reflexive in its own right – commenting on its own creative machinery, putting Quixote in situations where he finds himself confronted by the effects of the fictional legacy of Book One – so it dwells momentarily on a gentle parody of humanist self-reflexivity, a discussion of the principles of statecraft.