Don Quixote

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1605

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Part 2, Chapters 20-29Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 2, Chapter 20 Summary

The wedding begins early the next day. Panza is impressed by the huge feast on offer. Everything has been paid for by the wealthy Camacho. Quixote and Panza take part in the celebrations, watching the dancing and theater performances. The actors put on a satirical show about money and love. After seeing Camacho’s wealth in person, Panza is convinced Quiteria will marry Camacho rather than Basilio. Quixote believes that she is making the wrong choice.

Part 2, Chapter 21 Summary

Camacho and Quiteria begin their wedding. Basilio interrupts the ceremony. He brandishes a knife and then kills himself, using his last words to ask Quiteria to marry him. She agrees and marries Basilio so he can seek forgiveness from God as he lays dying. Then, Basilio reveals his suicide was a ruse. A fight breaks out. Quixote stops the fight and demands people cease their violence in the name of love. Though Basilio and Quiteria stay married, Camacho takes solace in knowing his wife would never have truly loved him. Quixote and Panza leave the wedding to follow the newlyweds away from the village.

Part 2, Chapter 22 Summary

After three days with the newlyweds, Quixote and Panza accept an off from Basilio’s cousin to guide them to the famous Cave of Montesinos. The man is a satirical author who parodies classical literature. When they reach the cave, Panza and the guide lower Quixote down on a rope. They wait a while and hear nothing from him. They haul him back to the surface and discover he has fallen asleep. After he wakes up, Quixote blames the others for tearing him away from a wondrous experience.

Part 2, Chapter 23 Summary

Quixote explains he never reached the bottom of the cave. Instead, he stopped at a ledge and fell asleep. When he woke from his nap, he found himself in a wondrous meadow where he met Montesinos. According to Quixote’s beloved books, Montesinos is one of a group of 12 famous knights. However, Montesinos explained to Quixote that he and many others had been sentenced to spend eternity in the cave by the wizard Merlin. Quixote remembers talking to Montesinos for three days, during which he even saw the peasant girl whom Panza claimed was Dulcinea. As Quixote describes the peasant girl, Panza decides his master has lost any sense of reality. He demands that Quixote come to his senses. Quixote insists that magic is real.

Part 2, Chapter 24 Summary

The narrator notes the translation includes a reference in the margin claiming Quixote’s story from the cave cannot be true. Back in the story, the guide is delighted by Quixote’s descriptions of the cave. He wants to use the details in one of his books. The men take to the road again where they meet a man traveling with a great cache of weapons. The man promises to tell his story if they meet him at a nearby inn. As they travel to the inn, they meet a boy who claims to be going to war. Quixote praises the boy’s bravery and invites him to the inn.

Part 2, Chapter 25 Summary

Quixote, Panza, and the guide reach the inn. They meet the weapons seller, who tells them a story about two magistrates and a donkey that has caused a small war between two nearby villages. A famous puppeteer named Master Pedro comes to the inn. He is accompanied by a supposedly magical ape that can whisper people’s fortunes into his ear. The characters do not know Master Pedro’s true identity; he is actually Gines de Pasamonte, one of the galley slaves Quixote set free. When Panza asks the ape about his wife, Master Pedro drops to his knees and lavishes praise on Quixote. Though flattered, Quixote worries Master Pedro is a magician in league with the devil. Quixote asks the ape about the meeting with Montesinos in the cave. The ape reveals that some parts were true, and some parts were false.

Part 2, Chapter 26 Summary

Master Pedro puts on a puppet show. The show tells the story of a knight named Don Gaiferos who freed his wife Melisendra from her imprisonment with the Moors. Quixote becomes so engrossed in the story he tries to free the puppets from their prison using his sword. The puppet show is destroyed, and the ape escapes; Quixote blames the destruction on the magicians. He pays Pedro for the damages and wonders to himself whether Gaiferos and Melisendra returned safely to France.

Part 2, Chapter 27 Summary

Quixote and Panza are swept up in the strange war between the two nearby villages. Like the men in the weapons seller’s story, the warring sides bray at each other like donkeys. Quixote tries to talk one of the villages down from their battle. Just as he is about to convince them to lay down their weapons, Panza interjects. Panza defends the sound made by donkeys and, in an act of solidarity, he begins to bray. The villagers believe he is insulting them. They attack Panza and knock him out while Quixote runs away. The villagers declare victory as the men from the other village did not appear.

Part 2, Chapter 28 Summary

Panza is angry that Quixote ran away. Quixote criticizes Panza for braying in front of the villagers. He defends his decision to run away because he needed to preserve his reputation as a knight. When Panza brings up the issue of wages again, Quixote becomes outraged. He sends Panza away. Eventually, Panza offers an apology to Quixote, and they fall asleep.

Part 2, Chapter 29 Summary

After two days’ travel, Quixote and Panza reach the river Ebro. Wondering how they can cross, they see a boat without sails or oars. Quixote insists that the boat must have been left for him by a kindly fellow knight. They board the boat, though Panza complains they have left Rocinante and his donkey behind. The boat travels slowly down the river. Despite their meandering pace, Quixote insists they have traveled so far they must have crossed the equator. They reach a flour mill powered by large waterwheels and Quixote convinces himself the mill is a castle. As they drift along in the boat, they are nearly crushed under the waterwheels. They are saved by the men working in the mills. The boat is destroyed, and Quixote approaches the mill, insisting they are imprisoning a knight inside. The owner of the boat arrives at the mill. Quixote pays him for the destruction of the boat. He blames the magicians for deceiving him once again.

Part 2, Chapters 20-29 Analysis

The descent into the Cave of Montesinos is the culmination of Quixote’s absurdity and his imagination. When he is pulled from the cave, he explains that he did not reach the bottom. He curled up on a ledge and fell asleep, leaving the two men at the top to worry about his well-being. Quixote’s actions in this moment are inherently absurd: After spending so long talking about his desire to explore the cave, he never followed through on his actions and simply fell asleep instead. However, the way he explains himself forces the audience to wonder about the sincerity of Quixote’s beliefs. He explains he experienced a vivid dream that was more important than any exploration of the cave.

The story of the dream is self-serving as it functions as an excuse for Quixote’s laziness—he tries to distract from his failure with an outlandish story. However, Panza and others are already doubting Quixote’s sense of reality. He may well be sincere in his belief he experienced this dream, or even in his belief that some of it was true and some of it was false. The level of detail in Quixote’s vivid descriptions makes the dream seem like more than an excuse, and later in the novel, he continues to reference the dream rather than allow everyone to forget about his embarrassing behavior. Panza, who has used magical excuses in a similar fashion, doubts his master’s excuse, but Quixote seems to possess no self-doubt. The question of whether Quixote is experiencing delusions or simply lying is raised again, but the strength and sincerity of Quixote’s rhetoric suggests that, at the very least, he believes the dream was real.

The veracity of the story of the cave becomes a chance for Cervantes to interject himself into the story again. In his role as the narrator, he mentions a previous writer and translator has included a note in the margin that insists Quixote’s experiences must be fake. The mention of the note is a reminder to the audience that the experiences in the story are many times removed from reality. In this moment, Cervantes is explaining a translator’s note in the margin of a story that has passed through the hands of several translators and authors. The note describes an absurd man describing his own dream. The fundamental truth of the incident—if any such truth exists—is being related and interpreted by a series of different people. The note in the margin shows that some do not believe while men like Cervantes are more sympathetic to Quixote. As such, there is an inherent tension in the novel as the different writers and translators are providing their own interpretation of not just Quixote’s story but also of each other’s work. The question of whether to believe Quixote must always be framed by the question of how much the audience can trust the many authors, narrators, and translators who project their own thoughts and feelings onto the story.

This question of believable reality is also explored in Quixote’s reaction to the puppet show. Master Pedro’s puppet show feels so real to Quixote that he picks up his sword and smashes the stage to pieces, hoping to save the damsel in distress. Like the audience, Quixote is no longer sure which parts of a work of fiction are real and which are invented. He becomes so invested in the play that he convinces himself it is real. The audience, Cervantes, and everyone who meets Quixote take on the role of Quixote watching the puppets. They are watching something absurd and unreal, but they convince themselves it is real because the characters are compelling. The puppet show and Quixote’s reaction to it function as an ironic commentary on the nature of the novel itself, in which something so patently untrue and fictional becomes an exploration of the blurred lines between fiction and reality. For the audience and Quixote, the question of whether a work of fiction can feel real is more important and compelling than the fundamental truth of whether it is actually real.