Don Quixote

Panza is a peasant man who lives near Quixote. At first, he is convinced to join Quixote’s adventure by promises of fame and fortune. He is also more than a little intrigued by the strange and arrogant man who dresses in a cardboard helmet and insists he is a knight. Over the course of the novel, however, Panza changes. He becomes fiercely loyal to his master, and even when he is given everything he ever wanted, he is willing to give up fame and fortune to return to Quixote’s side. Furthermore, he becomes deeply engrained in Quixote’s delusions. While he is initially the person who points out the giants are actually windmills, he eventually begins to see the world through the lens of Quixote’s delusions. He blames magicians for everything that goes wrong, convinces himself he has seen the world from high up on the back of a flying wooden horse, and demands the world recognize his wit when a counterfeit volume of adventures is published in which he is a character. Panza may begin the novel as a greedy, self-interested cynic, but he ends the novel as Quixote’s greatest friend and an equal partner in his master’s absurdity.

Unlike Quixote, Panza has no social status. Quixote is an aristocrat, and he is permitted to call himself Don and a knight. Panza lacks this social standing. He is a peasant, and he is fiercely insistent that he recognize his place in society. When the people of the island welcome him as their new governor, he demands that they do not refer to him as Don Panza. Furthermore, he is keenly aware of his own lack of financial resources. He joins the adventure to become rich, but the limits of his financial ambition are clear. By the end of the novel, he cares more about owning a fine donkey than ruling over an island. His needs are practical and immediate: His farm and his family have no place in the courts of the nobles, he believes, but they could use gold coins or a new donkey. Panza’s keen awareness of his place in society is a running joke that delineates between those with wealth and those without. He lacks the ambition and the status to fully join his master’s delusion but creates his own separate form of unreality more suited to his social status. Panza never believes that he can become a glorious knight like his master, but he certainly believes he can achieve glory as a famous squire.

The friendship between Panza and Quixote is the backbone of the novel. The men frequently argue, and Panza is dismissed by his master as foolish and ineloquent. Panza is criticized for using proverbs frequently, though Quixote’s love of chivalry is just a more pretentious version of traditional knowledge and insight shared through easily consumable stories. In this respect, the men are often the same but viewed from different perspectives. They share a sense of loyalty, a sense of duty, and a strange view of the world. While Panza may occasionally be cynical, suspicious, or dishonest, he is always sincere about his loyalty to Quixote. When they are separate, they pine for one another. When Quixote falls sick, Panza tries everything to cheer him up. Panza joins his master’s adventure because he is promised fame and fortune, but he comes to realize the real fortune is the friend he makes in Quixote.

Dulcinea del Toboso is a mysterious presence in the novel. Only Panza and Quixote are mentioned more often by name, but the elusive Dulcinea never appears in person. Instead, her character is created through the conversations of other people. Her main role is to be the chivalric foil to Quixote. When he becomes a knight, he realizes he needs a princess to whom he can dedicate his good deeds. He wants someone whose beauty and innocence he can praise at every opportunity. Quixote does not know any such woman, so he picks a local peasant woman whom he has never met and decides this woman is Dulcinea and that she is the perfect woman. Like the windmills, Dulcinea is part of Quixote’s delusions. She is a character who exists entirely in his head. Like most of his delusions, however, his sheer force of will manifests her into a real presence in the novel. Dulcinea becomes a character because she is talked about, praised, and complimented so often. Dulcinea as a character is a cipher for Quixote’s delusion. She exists at first to show the absurdity of his beliefs and then, later in the novel, her growing fame shows his capacity to manifest change in a world through the sheer force of his will. Dulcinea the beautiful princess may not exist, but Quixote makes her famous anyway, turning her into a character in her own right.

Panza provides an alternative perspective on Dulcinea. As Quixote talks about the local woman, Panza realizes he knows the peasant woman on whom Dulcinea is based. Panza realizes that in reality Dulcinea is an unremarkable, not particularly beautiful peasant woman with a sordid reputation. When Quixote asks to see Dulcinea or when he asks Panza to deliver a letter to her, Panza is caught in a bind. He must either point out his master’s delusions, lie, or accept Quixote’s view of the world. Dulcinea represents a choice for Panza. At first, he lists the real Dulcinea’s flaws. Then he tries to trick and lie to Quixote about her. Finally, he comes to accept Quixote’s view of the world. He blames magicians and enchanters for her strange appearance and while he will not whip himself on her behalf, he accepts his master’s need to save the beautiful princess. Panza’s willingness to indulge his master’s delusions regarding Dulcinea can be used to chart the course of their friendship, from cynical mockery to loyal devotion (with a little self-interested financial motivation at the same time). 

Sanson Carrasco is a young scholar who plots with Pero Perez and Master Nicholas to bring Quixote home. At first, he is presented as a youthful intellectual and someone who can match Quixote’s love of literature and rhetoric. Eventually, however, he becomes Quixote’s rival and helps to bring about the protagonist’s downfall. Carrasco hatches a plan to duel against Quixote and expose Quixote’s absurdity to the world. By beating him as a knight, Carrasco hopes he can show Quixote’s claims are hollow. He hopes that doing so will force Quixote to give up his ridiculous adventure and come home. However, Quixote wins. To Carrasco, this loss is not just a physical defeat. He feels embarrassed on an intellectual level. While Quixote’s stories tell of knights who are obsessed with honor according to the chivalric code, Carrasco is obsessed with his own ego. Being beaten by Quixote is a wound to his arrogance and his intellectualism; he cannot accept he has been beaten by a man who believes in fairy tales and absurd ideas. As such, he becomes obsessed. He chases Quixote across Spain and tries to trick him into fighting another duel. In doing so, Carrasco abandons his own ideals and accepts Quixote’s view of the world. Carrasco was once a sensible young intellectual, but after the defeat to Quixote, he becomes obsessed with regaining his honor against a rival knight. He has become a character in the works of chivalric fiction Quixote is creating. To beat Quixote, Carrasco is forced to accept Quixote’s view of the world. While Carrasco might triumph in the final duel in a literal sense, he loses because he surrenders himself to Quixote’s ideas. Carrasco is morally defeated by Quixote because he is forced to embrace all of Quixote’s ideas and reject his own identity to win. Carrasco’s victory in the duel is a literal triumph and a moral defeat, demonstrating the extent to which he has become obsessed with the same ideas and ethos he once dismissed as absurd.