Don Quixote de La Mancha
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Tags: Comics & Fiction, knight, chivalry, World Literature, Miguel Cervantes, Dostoevsky By: kerflipplesnap |
Heroic Strivings:
A Juxtaposition of Cervantes’ Don Quixote and Dostoevsky’s Underground Man
It is hard to imagine a world without heroes, for the theme of heroism has always played a fundamental role in Western literature from the ancient days of Homer up through the twenty-first century. In fact, the heroic tradition is seemingly as old as Western culture itself. Of course, the nature of heroic essence has varied over time, and the qualities that define a literary hero tend to depend on the historical time period in which a work was written, the culture that produced it, what was going on at the time socially, culturally, and politically, and the literary genre of the work. Still, some would argue that there are certain aspects of literary heroism that seem to transcend time and culture – that the Odysseuses, Beowulfs, and King Arthurs of the Western literary tradition share some common characteristics that are universally esteemed, apparently never depreciating in value. Perhaps one such characteristic, shared by many traditional literary heroes across time, culture, and genre, is the possession of a certain degree of sanity. After all, heroes are often called upon to use their mettle and quick thinking, in addition to their courage and strength, to preserve themselves through their trials and carry their quests forward. But must clarity of mind and a conventional understanding of reality necessarily be considered prerequisites for heroism? What if a character had a skewed perception of reality, but continued to exhibit all of the other universally heroic qualities – could such a character, despite his madness, still be considered heroic? This seems to be the case with Don Quixote de la Mancha, the protagonist of Miguel de Cervantes’s groundbreaking novel of the same name. Don Quixote, who is certainly mad, is at first nothing more than a mockery of chivalric romanticism. But, by the end of the story, he evolves into a true hero, albeit an unusual one, in the eyes of the reader. This total transformation from comic fool to tragic hero is able to occur because Don Quixote deals with his madness in a way that is inherently noble and virtuous. Other ‘mad’ protagonists, such as the Underground Man of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, emerge from their stories as definitive anti-heroes because they respond negatively to their distorted realities and are utterly deficient of the same universally heroic qualities that elevate characters like Don Quixote. These two contrasting characters, when viewed side-by-side, expose one another’s idiosyncratic subtleties and highlight the ways in which madness can lead one either toward or away from the distinction of ‘hero.’ Both Cervantes’s Don Quixote and Dostoevsky’s Underground Man are characters who tend to have a distorted view of reality, but the way each interprets and reacts to that perceived reality defines the virtue of his character, causing them to emerge as characters at opposite ends of the heroic spectrum – Don Quixote as a hero, the Underground Man as an anti-hero.
Before looking at these two characters in detail, it might be helpful to first objectively determine some of the traits that constitute a hero. As the Western literary tradition changed and evolved over the centuries, so did the types of heroes that colored its great works. As cultures progressed, bringing about changes in attitudes and values, literature in some societies began to see a shift away from near-divine, warrior-like heroes like Achilles and Beowulf toward heroes of a more humble, grounded kind, such as the pilgrim Dante in The Divine Comedy for instance. One constant, however, seems to be that the hero is someone with whom the reader is able to identify and sympathize as he undergoes some sort of struggle or mission. Hillon, Smith, and Isaacs, in their article entitled “Heroic/Anti-Heroic Narratives: The Quests of Sherron Watkins,” define this essential struggle as a “great and complicated journey towards a compelling but forbidding objective” (2). They go on to describe this “journey of transformation” as a quest typically consisting of three parts: “the departure, the initiation, and the return” (2). Hillon and his co-authors acknowledge that their definitions are not fixed or precise, but will vary slightly depending on the text in question. Their ideas may be perceived, then, as a sort of template for how a character generally becomes a hero, based on tradition. As they elaborate on the idea of a three-part journey, they describe the first phase, the departure, as the hero being called upon to embark on an adventure that he may be reluctant to undertake (2). They assert that “although he may still have doubts, he will be lured or carried away into the adventure of the unknown” (2). The second stage of the quest, then, may be described as “a time of initiation and transformation in which the hero travels through a world of unfamiliar yet strangely intimate forces which threaten, test, or help the hero” (2). The third and final stage of the journey is the return, which, like the first stage, takes the hero “from one world to another, from the transcendental back to the real world” (3).
Aside from Hillon, Smith, and Isaacs’s observations about the struggles all heroes endure, there are a few other themes that seem to remain important factors in the establishment of a hero across genres. For example, literary heroes are usually endowed with sound, praiseworthy morals that are in some way analogous to the reader’s – or they at least progress towards the attainment of such morals during their journey. They are typically committed to some sense of justice and may, according to Hillon and company, be “generally motivated by an inner will to serve humanity” (7). Furthermore, literary heroes are traditionally virtuous, or become virtuous as a result of their struggles. They are usually inclined to be concerned with personal honor, and they gain the reader’s sympathy by displaying familiar understandings of human emotions such as love, fear, doubt, desire, and passion. Most importantly, a hero must be proactive – resolutely working towards some betterment of himself, his situation, his surroundings, or the correction of some specific injustice. If a character is able to meet most of these criteria by the end of his story, then he may potentially be considered a hero.
Now that some timeless, universal heroic qualities have been established, an evaluation of the characters Don Quixote and the Underground Man can begin. Starting with the would-be knight of La Mancha, there is no question that this character is a madman with a distorted view of reality. The narrator of the story says so outright in the opening chapter: “Our gentleman became so immersed in his reading that he spent whole nights from sundown to sunup and his days from dawn to dusk in poring over his books, until, finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind” (1529). The preceding quote also clearly defines the source of Don Quixote’s madness – his love for reading books of chivalry is the unmistakable culprit. The romantic tales lead him astray, stimulating his imagination to the point where he can no longer distinguish reality from the fantastical occurrences of the stories he reads. This blurring of the line separating fantasy from reality is what ultimately leads to Don Quixote’s sallying forth in search of adventures: “It now appeared to him fitting and necessary, in order to win a greater amount of honor for himself and serve his country at the same time, to become a knight-errant and roam the world on horseback, in a suit of armor” (1529). Then, over the course of the following chapters, Don Quixote’s actions seem to confirm the narrator’s diagnosis of madness as the reader is treated to instance after instance of the would-be knight’s mistaking identities and intentions, attacking innocent people, and generally making a mess of things. Despite the often-negative outcome of his actions, however, Don Quixote emerges as a sort of hero at the story’s end, largely because the attitude and intentions behind his actions are inherently honorable and virtuous.
While the madness of Don Quixote is seemingly incontestable, so is the nobility and virtue of his intentions. The quote invoked above evinces that Don Quixote, by arriving at such an irrational resolution, is nonetheless very concerned with personal honor, committed to justice, and also ‘motivated by an inner will to serve humanity.’ While Don Quixote’s skewed perception of reality often causes the outcome of his actions to have an effect that is contrary to what he had intended, his honest intention in every scenario is to enact justice, “right wrongs and come to the aid of the wretched,” etc. (1564). The chivalric ideals that he pursues so resolutely are themselves noble, and from his distorted point of view, he is always doing the right thing. Bearing this in mind, it is hard to hold the adverse results of his misdirected goodwill against him. A telling example of the noble intentions behind Don Quixote’s actions occurs in the adventure of the galley slaves. This example is particularly ironic because in his attempt to carry out justice, Don Quixote actually stands in the way of justice by releasing a group of convicted criminals from their sentences. Still, he reveals that his heart is in the right place when he says to his squire, Sancho, “The short of it is . . . whichever way you put it, these people are being taken there by force and not of their own free will” (1564). And it would be difficult to argue with him when he says, “It does not appear to me to be just to make slaves of those whom God created as free men” (1570). The fact that the men he is releasing are in shackles because they are guilty of crimes does not seem problematic to Don Quixote because “God in Heaven will not fail to punish the evil and reward the good” (1570). So here Don Quixote reveals logic that is not altogether unreasonable, especially considering his distorted perspective. He may actually be standing in the way of justice, but he clearly means well. It is therefore hard not to sympathize with him and share his indignation when the freed prisoners show him such ingratitude. It is at points such as these that, according to John Allen, author of Don Quixote: Hero or Fool?, “all of the preparation – the established pattern of pride and fall, the accumulation of affection and admiration that is the product of bits and pieces of eloquence, wit, charity, nobility, valor, generosity, patience, and fortitude -- is brought to bear . . . and the sensitive reader suffers with a man at whom he has repeatedly laughed for some eight hundred pages” (47).
In order to further establish Don Quixote’s legitimacy as a hero, a brief comparison of his quest to the ‘journey of transformation’ described by Hillon, Smith, and Isaacs is needed. Concerning the first stage of the journey – the departure – Don Quixote reveals his inherent heroicness by taking up his quest voluntarily, rather than being called upon. He is neither unwilling nor reluctant. The second stage of Don Quixote’s journey is indeed a time of ‘initiation and transformation’ as the would-be knight gallantly bears confrontation with many obstacles and challenges to his perceived reality. Hillon and company’s explanation of the third stage of a hero’s journey appears to fit Don Quixote to a T – his return to sanity and renouncement of chivalric ideals in the story’s final chapters are evidence that the character has moved from one world to another – ‘from the transcendental back to the real world.’ All of this indicates that the journey undertaken by Don Quixote throughout the course of the novel is, according to the parameters defined by Hillon and his co-authors, a quest of undeniably heroic proportions.
The Underground Man of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground is a little more difficult to analyze, because the quest of this complicated character is more inwardly directed, and his madness is not quite so overtly and explicitly established. Notes from Underground differs from Don Quixote in that it lacks an objective narrator and the story is instead told by the Underground Man himself in the first person. While the narrator of Don Quixote makes it clear that the story’s protagonist is mad, the Underground Man does not openly admit his own madness as madness, but instead reveals it through what he discloses about himself, his values, his morals, and how he interacts with others. The Underground Man is not a hopeless fool living in an imagined fantasy world, like Don Quixote. In this respect, the two are polar opposites, for the Underground Man repeatedly refers to himself as “hyperconscious.” This hyperconsciousness is precisely what torments the Underground Man and drives him further away from society – he describes it as “a real positive disease” (419). This hyperconsciousness enables him to be so aware of himself and the intricate processes of his mind that he cannot stand himself: “I very often looked at myself with furious discontent, which verged on loathing” (444). In fact, the portrait that the Underground Man paints of himself is decidedly unflattering, further indicating this deep sense of discontent and self-loathing: “I am a sick man . . . I am a spiteful man. I am an unpleasant man” (417). Victor Brombert sums up the character’s madness and self-loathing in his article “Dostoevsky’s Underground Man: Portrait of the Paradoxalist”:
“The self-portrait of this lover of paradoxes is essentially
derogatory. The underground man launches his monologue under
the sign of a sickness, the chief symptom of which seems to be
the morbid pleasure of experiencing and inflicting pain . . .
Dostoevsky's protagonist looks at himself, judges himself, holds
himself in contempt. If his moans are malicious, it is because he
wishes to deny all dignity to his own suffering, but also to provoke
a malaise, and to teach that to know oneself means to lose all
self-respect” (67).
While self-loathing alone does not necessarily constitute madness, the extent of this character’s contempt causes him to think and behave in ways that are often asocial and irrational, and at times even sadistic. When he explains, “I made friends with no one and even avoided talking, and hid myself in my corner more and more,” he reveals that he has withdrawn from the real world almost entirely, and is now viewing it as an outsider from a very warped, isolated perspective (443). Joe E. Barnhart, author of Dostoevsky’s Polyphonic Talent, defines this tendency as the Underground Man’s “incapacity . . . to enter into relation with the world outside himself” (197). When he does interact with others, his conduct is governed by his desire to feel powerful and superior through manipulation. In fact, Barnhart states that all of the Underground Man’s relationships with others “degenerate into what he conceives as power duels between separate egos” (197). All of this indicates a very disturbed individual – an indication that is compounded by the countless paradoxes, contradictions, and revealed ambivalence that emerge from the Underground Man’s babbling. Still, some of the clearest indications of this character’s madness are revealed by his own articulated confessions: “My petty passions were acute, smarting, from my continual sickly irritability I had hysterical fits, with tears and convulsions” (447).
The madness of the Underground Man differs considerably from the madness of Don Quixote. While these two characters both have unorthodox takes on reality, they still perceive it differently from one another, which leads them to extraordinarily different resolutions. Don Quixote’s madness leads him to undertake heroic strivings, while the madness of the Underground Man causes him to retreat further and further into his corner of what he called ‘the Underground’ – a position from which he seeks only to deride and manipulate others. By referring back to the previously established parameters of heroism, one is able to see that the Underground Man reacts to his perceived reality in ways that are decidedly unheroic. First of all, the Underground man reveals himself as morally lacking by his apparent enjoyment at the expense of others. And there is no progression; at the end of the novel, the Underground Man is just as morally defective as he was at the beginning. Furthermore, the Underground Man confesses that he is a creature of vice and that he indulges his vice “at night, furtively, timidly, filthily, with a feeling of shame which never [deserts] me” (447). As far as a commitment to justice and a will to serve humanity goes, the Underground Man demonstrates that he is not motivated by either ideal. Instead, he is considerably selfish, and, according to Barnhart, “his dreams for setting the world aright are not for the good of the world, but for his own pleasure” (197). The Underground Man himself admits that his interest in the prostitute Liza is not due to his concern for her well-being, but because he is able to amuse himself by manipulating her: “The sport in it attracted me most” (477). And unlike Don Quixote, the Underground Man is seemingly unconcerned with personal honor, since he willingly depicts himself in such negative terms as ‘spiteful’ and ‘fastidious’ throughout the novel. He also indicates that he lacks a passion or attachment to anything when he states that there is nothing in his surroundings to “attract” (447) him, and his understanding of love is likewise corrupted by his spitefulness: “With me love meant tyrannizing and showing my moral superiority. I have never in my life ever been able to imagine any other sort of love, and have nowadays come to the point of sometimes thinking that love really consists in the right – freely given of the beloved object – to be tyrannized over . . . I always began it with hatred and ended it with moral subjugation” (498-499). The result of all these shortcomings is a character with which most rational readers would have difficulty identifying. The reclusive, unsociable, apathetic attitude of the character seems to be in contrast with the virtuous traits normally embodied by literary heroes. The ultimate indicator of the Underground Man’s unheroic nature, however, is his inertia. It is clear that he perceives his modern culture and society as problematic – be it due to a loss of free will, a perceived attempt to reform man, universal reason, the inflexibility of two plus two equals four, or something else – yet he appears to accept it with a degree of resignation (even though he claims he does not). He does nothing to improve the things he sees as problematic – he writes about them, but nothing more. And even his writing is selfishly motivated, because he claims that he writes solely for himself, and plans to “never have readers” (442). So the Underground Man does nothing, and furthermore, ridicules “men of action” as “stupid and limited” (426). He sees no shame in this course of (in)action, proclaiming unabashedly, “The long and the short of it is, gentlemen, that it is better to do nothing! Better conscious inertia! And so hurrah for underground!” (440).
It is more difficult to juxtapose the ‘quest’ of the Underground Man with the ‘journey of transformation’ defined by Hillon, Smith, and Isaacs because in Notes From Underground, the “place of action is consciousness itself” (Brombert 3). The ‘compelling but forbidding objective’ towards which the Underground Man appears to be moving is to ultimately express himself. But the final words of the story, from the fictional editor, indicate that it is an objective that the protagonist will never be able to fully attain. In the words of Barnhart, “the Underground Man must go on, trapped in the vortex of his own acute consciousness and unable to make an end because he must constantly contradict what he has just said” (198). It would seem, then, that the Underground Man never reaches the third stage of Hillon and company’s model journey – the return. There is nothing to indicate that he has, or ever will, ascend from the underground. That the Underground Man undergoes the second stage of Hillon and company’s model, however, is incontrovertible. He grapples endlessly with ‘unfamiliar yet strangely intimate forces which threaten and test’ him. But in the end, he seems to gain nothing; in the final paragraph of the narrative he concludes, “I have ruined my life by morally rotting in my corner” (501). Bearing all of this in mind, it would then seem that the Underground Man’s journey does in some ways resemble the journey of a hero, but the critical point is that he does not bring it full circle. He is not enriched by his quest. Instead, he is defiant and wretched to the end. He expresses no remorse, except that he is sorry Liza humiliated him. The fact that the Underground Man, as a protagonist, undergoes a hero’s journey, only to remain negative, hostile, and abusive without compunction, and to seek to selfishly manipulate others for his own self-serving ends, effectively marks him as the opposite of a hero – an anti-hero.
Thus, Don Quixote and the Underground Man are characters at opposite ends of the heroic spectrum. Both of them have distorted views of reality, but the similarities more or less seem to end there. Don Quixote reacts to his perceived reality in a positive, selfless fashion, while the Underground Man sinks into his mire. Morally, there is no question who is the superior hero; Don Quixote’s virtue shines through in even his most bungled misadventures, while the Underground Man repeatedly reasserts his spitefulness and selfishness. Not only is Don Quixote driven by the most honorable intentions, but on the fundamental level, the mere act of leaving home and sallying forth in order to “put into practice all that he had read in his books” is a noble act and a heroic gesture (1529). The Underground Man is merely content to timidly cast stones from the underground and delude himself with the belief that he is vindicated. While he proudly pursues no course of action, Don Quixote, on the other hand, perceives a world bereft with injustice, lacking men of honor to stand up to defend the oppressed and punish the wicked, and he actually attempts to do something about it. One cannot accuse him of complicity by inaction, because he is proactive, making every effort to stand up for what he thinks is right. Furthermore, Don Quixote is steadfast, resolute, and uncompromising in his pursuit of justice – a quality that, despite his madness, embodies the very essence of heroism. None of these virtues, however, can be attributed to the Underground Man. The only issue on which these two such dissimilar characters seem to meet on common ground is their demonstrations of the power of reading to influence one’s thinking. In fact, even Don Quixote would undoubtedly have to agree with the Underground Man when he asserts in his final paragraph, “After all, we have reached the point of almost looking at actual ‘real life’ as an effort, almost as hard work, and we are all privately agreed, that it is better in books” (501).
Works Cited
Primary Sources:
Cervantes, Miguel de. Don Quixote. Trans. Samuel Putnam. The Norton Anthology of World
Masterpieces. New York: W.W. Norton, 1997. 1527-1628.
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Notes from Underground. Sixteen Short Novels. Ed. Wilfrid Sheed. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1985. 415-502.
Secondary Sources:
Allen, John J. Don Quixote: Hero or Fool? A Study in Narrative Technique. Gainesville: U of Florida P, 1969.
Barnhart, Joe E., ed. Dostoevsky’s Polyphonic Talent. Lanham, MD: UP of America, 2005.
Brombert, Victor. “Dostoevsky’s Underground Man: Portrait of a Paradoxalist.” Raritan: A Quarterly Review 15 (1995): 67-81.
Hillon, Mark E., William L. Smith, and Gabriel D. Isaacs. “Heroic/Anti-Heroic Narratives: The Quests of Sherron Watkins.” Tamara: Journal of Critical Postmodern Organization Science (2005).
A Juxtaposition of Cervantes’ Don Quixote and Dostoevsky’s Underground Man
It is hard to imagine a world without heroes, for the theme of heroism has always played a fundamental role in Western literature from the ancient days of Homer up through the twenty-first century. In fact, the heroic tradition is seemingly as old as Western culture itself. Of course, the nature of heroic essence has varied over time, and the qualities that define a literary hero tend to depend on the historical time period in which a work was written, the culture that produced it, what was going on at the time socially, culturally, and politically, and the literary genre of the work. Still, some would argue that there are certain aspects of literary heroism that seem to transcend time and culture – that the Odysseuses, Beowulfs, and King Arthurs of the Western literary tradition share some common characteristics that are universally esteemed, apparently never depreciating in value. Perhaps one such characteristic, shared by many traditional literary heroes across time, culture, and genre, is the possession of a certain degree of sanity. After all, heroes are often called upon to use their mettle and quick thinking, in addition to their courage and strength, to preserve themselves through their trials and carry their quests forward. But must clarity of mind and a conventional understanding of reality necessarily be considered prerequisites for heroism? What if a character had a skewed perception of reality, but continued to exhibit all of the other universally heroic qualities – could such a character, despite his madness, still be considered heroic? This seems to be the case with Don Quixote de la Mancha, the protagonist of Miguel de Cervantes’s groundbreaking novel of the same name. Don Quixote, who is certainly mad, is at first nothing more than a mockery of chivalric romanticism. But, by the end of the story, he evolves into a true hero, albeit an unusual one, in the eyes of the reader. This total transformation from comic fool to tragic hero is able to occur because Don Quixote deals with his madness in a way that is inherently noble and virtuous. Other ‘mad’ protagonists, such as the Underground Man of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, emerge from their stories as definitive anti-heroes because they respond negatively to their distorted realities and are utterly deficient of the same universally heroic qualities that elevate characters like Don Quixote. These two contrasting characters, when viewed side-by-side, expose one another’s idiosyncratic subtleties and highlight the ways in which madness can lead one either toward or away from the distinction of ‘hero.’ Both Cervantes’s Don Quixote and Dostoevsky’s Underground Man are characters who tend to have a distorted view of reality, but the way each interprets and reacts to that perceived reality defines the virtue of his character, causing them to emerge as characters at opposite ends of the heroic spectrum – Don Quixote as a hero, the Underground Man as an anti-hero.
Before looking at these two characters in detail, it might be helpful to first objectively determine some of the traits that constitute a hero. As the Western literary tradition changed and evolved over the centuries, so did the types of heroes that colored its great works. As cultures progressed, bringing about changes in attitudes and values, literature in some societies began to see a shift away from near-divine, warrior-like heroes like Achilles and Beowulf toward heroes of a more humble, grounded kind, such as the pilgrim Dante in The Divine Comedy for instance. One constant, however, seems to be that the hero is someone with whom the reader is able to identify and sympathize as he undergoes some sort of struggle or mission. Hillon, Smith, and Isaacs, in their article entitled “Heroic/Anti-Heroic Narratives: The Quests of Sherron Watkins,” define this essential struggle as a “great and complicated journey towards a compelling but forbidding objective” (2). They go on to describe this “journey of transformation” as a quest typically consisting of three parts: “the departure, the initiation, and the return” (2). Hillon and his co-authors acknowledge that their definitions are not fixed or precise, but will vary slightly depending on the text in question. Their ideas may be perceived, then, as a sort of template for how a character generally becomes a hero, based on tradition. As they elaborate on the idea of a three-part journey, they describe the first phase, the departure, as the hero being called upon to embark on an adventure that he may be reluctant to undertake (2). They assert that “although he may still have doubts, he will be lured or carried away into the adventure of the unknown” (2). The second stage of the quest, then, may be described as “a time of initiation and transformation in which the hero travels through a world of unfamiliar yet strangely intimate forces which threaten, test, or help the hero” (2). The third and final stage of the journey is the return, which, like the first stage, takes the hero “from one world to another, from the transcendental back to the real world” (3).
Aside from Hillon, Smith, and Isaacs’s observations about the struggles all heroes endure, there are a few other themes that seem to remain important factors in the establishment of a hero across genres. For example, literary heroes are usually endowed with sound, praiseworthy morals that are in some way analogous to the reader’s – or they at least progress towards the attainment of such morals during their journey. They are typically committed to some sense of justice and may, according to Hillon and company, be “generally motivated by an inner will to serve humanity” (7). Furthermore, literary heroes are traditionally virtuous, or become virtuous as a result of their struggles. They are usually inclined to be concerned with personal honor, and they gain the reader’s sympathy by displaying familiar understandings of human emotions such as love, fear, doubt, desire, and passion. Most importantly, a hero must be proactive – resolutely working towards some betterment of himself, his situation, his surroundings, or the correction of some specific injustice. If a character is able to meet most of these criteria by the end of his story, then he may potentially be considered a hero.
Now that some timeless, universal heroic qualities have been established, an evaluation of the characters Don Quixote and the Underground Man can begin. Starting with the would-be knight of La Mancha, there is no question that this character is a madman with a distorted view of reality. The narrator of the story says so outright in the opening chapter: “Our gentleman became so immersed in his reading that he spent whole nights from sundown to sunup and his days from dawn to dusk in poring over his books, until, finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind” (1529). The preceding quote also clearly defines the source of Don Quixote’s madness – his love for reading books of chivalry is the unmistakable culprit. The romantic tales lead him astray, stimulating his imagination to the point where he can no longer distinguish reality from the fantastical occurrences of the stories he reads. This blurring of the line separating fantasy from reality is what ultimately leads to Don Quixote’s sallying forth in search of adventures: “It now appeared to him fitting and necessary, in order to win a greater amount of honor for himself and serve his country at the same time, to become a knight-errant and roam the world on horseback, in a suit of armor” (1529). Then, over the course of the following chapters, Don Quixote’s actions seem to confirm the narrator’s diagnosis of madness as the reader is treated to instance after instance of the would-be knight’s mistaking identities and intentions, attacking innocent people, and generally making a mess of things. Despite the often-negative outcome of his actions, however, Don Quixote emerges as a sort of hero at the story’s end, largely because the attitude and intentions behind his actions are inherently honorable and virtuous.
While the madness of Don Quixote is seemingly incontestable, so is the nobility and virtue of his intentions. The quote invoked above evinces that Don Quixote, by arriving at such an irrational resolution, is nonetheless very concerned with personal honor, committed to justice, and also ‘motivated by an inner will to serve humanity.’ While Don Quixote’s skewed perception of reality often causes the outcome of his actions to have an effect that is contrary to what he had intended, his honest intention in every scenario is to enact justice, “right wrongs and come to the aid of the wretched,” etc. (1564). The chivalric ideals that he pursues so resolutely are themselves noble, and from his distorted point of view, he is always doing the right thing. Bearing this in mind, it is hard to hold the adverse results of his misdirected goodwill against him. A telling example of the noble intentions behind Don Quixote’s actions occurs in the adventure of the galley slaves. This example is particularly ironic because in his attempt to carry out justice, Don Quixote actually stands in the way of justice by releasing a group of convicted criminals from their sentences. Still, he reveals that his heart is in the right place when he says to his squire, Sancho, “The short of it is . . . whichever way you put it, these people are being taken there by force and not of their own free will” (1564). And it would be difficult to argue with him when he says, “It does not appear to me to be just to make slaves of those whom God created as free men” (1570). The fact that the men he is releasing are in shackles because they are guilty of crimes does not seem problematic to Don Quixote because “God in Heaven will not fail to punish the evil and reward the good” (1570). So here Don Quixote reveals logic that is not altogether unreasonable, especially considering his distorted perspective. He may actually be standing in the way of justice, but he clearly means well. It is therefore hard not to sympathize with him and share his indignation when the freed prisoners show him such ingratitude. It is at points such as these that, according to John Allen, author of Don Quixote: Hero or Fool?, “all of the preparation – the established pattern of pride and fall, the accumulation of affection and admiration that is the product of bits and pieces of eloquence, wit, charity, nobility, valor, generosity, patience, and fortitude -- is brought to bear . . . and the sensitive reader suffers with a man at whom he has repeatedly laughed for some eight hundred pages” (47).
In order to further establish Don Quixote’s legitimacy as a hero, a brief comparison of his quest to the ‘journey of transformation’ described by Hillon, Smith, and Isaacs is needed. Concerning the first stage of the journey – the departure – Don Quixote reveals his inherent heroicness by taking up his quest voluntarily, rather than being called upon. He is neither unwilling nor reluctant. The second stage of Don Quixote’s journey is indeed a time of ‘initiation and transformation’ as the would-be knight gallantly bears confrontation with many obstacles and challenges to his perceived reality. Hillon and company’s explanation of the third stage of a hero’s journey appears to fit Don Quixote to a T – his return to sanity and renouncement of chivalric ideals in the story’s final chapters are evidence that the character has moved from one world to another – ‘from the transcendental back to the real world.’ All of this indicates that the journey undertaken by Don Quixote throughout the course of the novel is, according to the parameters defined by Hillon and his co-authors, a quest of undeniably heroic proportions.
The Underground Man of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground is a little more difficult to analyze, because the quest of this complicated character is more inwardly directed, and his madness is not quite so overtly and explicitly established. Notes from Underground differs from Don Quixote in that it lacks an objective narrator and the story is instead told by the Underground Man himself in the first person. While the narrator of Don Quixote makes it clear that the story’s protagonist is mad, the Underground Man does not openly admit his own madness as madness, but instead reveals it through what he discloses about himself, his values, his morals, and how he interacts with others. The Underground Man is not a hopeless fool living in an imagined fantasy world, like Don Quixote. In this respect, the two are polar opposites, for the Underground Man repeatedly refers to himself as “hyperconscious.” This hyperconsciousness is precisely what torments the Underground Man and drives him further away from society – he describes it as “a real positive disease” (419). This hyperconsciousness enables him to be so aware of himself and the intricate processes of his mind that he cannot stand himself: “I very often looked at myself with furious discontent, which verged on loathing” (444). In fact, the portrait that the Underground Man paints of himself is decidedly unflattering, further indicating this deep sense of discontent and self-loathing: “I am a sick man . . . I am a spiteful man. I am an unpleasant man” (417). Victor Brombert sums up the character’s madness and self-loathing in his article “Dostoevsky’s Underground Man: Portrait of the Paradoxalist”:
“The self-portrait of this lover of paradoxes is essentially
derogatory. The underground man launches his monologue under
the sign of a sickness, the chief symptom of which seems to be
the morbid pleasure of experiencing and inflicting pain . . .
Dostoevsky's protagonist looks at himself, judges himself, holds
himself in contempt. If his moans are malicious, it is because he
wishes to deny all dignity to his own suffering, but also to provoke
a malaise, and to teach that to know oneself means to lose all
self-respect” (67).
While self-loathing alone does not necessarily constitute madness, the extent of this character’s contempt causes him to think and behave in ways that are often asocial and irrational, and at times even sadistic. When he explains, “I made friends with no one and even avoided talking, and hid myself in my corner more and more,” he reveals that he has withdrawn from the real world almost entirely, and is now viewing it as an outsider from a very warped, isolated perspective (443). Joe E. Barnhart, author of Dostoevsky’s Polyphonic Talent, defines this tendency as the Underground Man’s “incapacity . . . to enter into relation with the world outside himself” (197). When he does interact with others, his conduct is governed by his desire to feel powerful and superior through manipulation. In fact, Barnhart states that all of the Underground Man’s relationships with others “degenerate into what he conceives as power duels between separate egos” (197). All of this indicates a very disturbed individual – an indication that is compounded by the countless paradoxes, contradictions, and revealed ambivalence that emerge from the Underground Man’s babbling. Still, some of the clearest indications of this character’s madness are revealed by his own articulated confessions: “My petty passions were acute, smarting, from my continual sickly irritability I had hysterical fits, with tears and convulsions” (447).
The madness of the Underground Man differs considerably from the madness of Don Quixote. While these two characters both have unorthodox takes on reality, they still perceive it differently from one another, which leads them to extraordinarily different resolutions. Don Quixote’s madness leads him to undertake heroic strivings, while the madness of the Underground Man causes him to retreat further and further into his corner of what he called ‘the Underground’ – a position from which he seeks only to deride and manipulate others. By referring back to the previously established parameters of heroism, one is able to see that the Underground Man reacts to his perceived reality in ways that are decidedly unheroic. First of all, the Underground man reveals himself as morally lacking by his apparent enjoyment at the expense of others. And there is no progression; at the end of the novel, the Underground Man is just as morally defective as he was at the beginning. Furthermore, the Underground Man confesses that he is a creature of vice and that he indulges his vice “at night, furtively, timidly, filthily, with a feeling of shame which never [deserts] me” (447). As far as a commitment to justice and a will to serve humanity goes, the Underground Man demonstrates that he is not motivated by either ideal. Instead, he is considerably selfish, and, according to Barnhart, “his dreams for setting the world aright are not for the good of the world, but for his own pleasure” (197). The Underground Man himself admits that his interest in the prostitute Liza is not due to his concern for her well-being, but because he is able to amuse himself by manipulating her: “The sport in it attracted me most” (477). And unlike Don Quixote, the Underground Man is seemingly unconcerned with personal honor, since he willingly depicts himself in such negative terms as ‘spiteful’ and ‘fastidious’ throughout the novel. He also indicates that he lacks a passion or attachment to anything when he states that there is nothing in his surroundings to “attract” (447) him, and his understanding of love is likewise corrupted by his spitefulness: “With me love meant tyrannizing and showing my moral superiority. I have never in my life ever been able to imagine any other sort of love, and have nowadays come to the point of sometimes thinking that love really consists in the right – freely given of the beloved object – to be tyrannized over . . . I always began it with hatred and ended it with moral subjugation” (498-499). The result of all these shortcomings is a character with which most rational readers would have difficulty identifying. The reclusive, unsociable, apathetic attitude of the character seems to be in contrast with the virtuous traits normally embodied by literary heroes. The ultimate indicator of the Underground Man’s unheroic nature, however, is his inertia. It is clear that he perceives his modern culture and society as problematic – be it due to a loss of free will, a perceived attempt to reform man, universal reason, the inflexibility of two plus two equals four, or something else – yet he appears to accept it with a degree of resignation (even though he claims he does not). He does nothing to improve the things he sees as problematic – he writes about them, but nothing more. And even his writing is selfishly motivated, because he claims that he writes solely for himself, and plans to “never have readers” (442). So the Underground Man does nothing, and furthermore, ridicules “men of action” as “stupid and limited” (426). He sees no shame in this course of (in)action, proclaiming unabashedly, “The long and the short of it is, gentlemen, that it is better to do nothing! Better conscious inertia! And so hurrah for underground!” (440).
It is more difficult to juxtapose the ‘quest’ of the Underground Man with the ‘journey of transformation’ defined by Hillon, Smith, and Isaacs because in Notes From Underground, the “place of action is consciousness itself” (Brombert 3). The ‘compelling but forbidding objective’ towards which the Underground Man appears to be moving is to ultimately express himself. But the final words of the story, from the fictional editor, indicate that it is an objective that the protagonist will never be able to fully attain. In the words of Barnhart, “the Underground Man must go on, trapped in the vortex of his own acute consciousness and unable to make an end because he must constantly contradict what he has just said” (198). It would seem, then, that the Underground Man never reaches the third stage of Hillon and company’s model journey – the return. There is nothing to indicate that he has, or ever will, ascend from the underground. That the Underground Man undergoes the second stage of Hillon and company’s model, however, is incontrovertible. He grapples endlessly with ‘unfamiliar yet strangely intimate forces which threaten and test’ him. But in the end, he seems to gain nothing; in the final paragraph of the narrative he concludes, “I have ruined my life by morally rotting in my corner” (501). Bearing all of this in mind, it would then seem that the Underground Man’s journey does in some ways resemble the journey of a hero, but the critical point is that he does not bring it full circle. He is not enriched by his quest. Instead, he is defiant and wretched to the end. He expresses no remorse, except that he is sorry Liza humiliated him. The fact that the Underground Man, as a protagonist, undergoes a hero’s journey, only to remain negative, hostile, and abusive without compunction, and to seek to selfishly manipulate others for his own self-serving ends, effectively marks him as the opposite of a hero – an anti-hero.
Thus, Don Quixote and the Underground Man are characters at opposite ends of the heroic spectrum. Both of them have distorted views of reality, but the similarities more or less seem to end there. Don Quixote reacts to his perceived reality in a positive, selfless fashion, while the Underground Man sinks into his mire. Morally, there is no question who is the superior hero; Don Quixote’s virtue shines through in even his most bungled misadventures, while the Underground Man repeatedly reasserts his spitefulness and selfishness. Not only is Don Quixote driven by the most honorable intentions, but on the fundamental level, the mere act of leaving home and sallying forth in order to “put into practice all that he had read in his books” is a noble act and a heroic gesture (1529). The Underground Man is merely content to timidly cast stones from the underground and delude himself with the belief that he is vindicated. While he proudly pursues no course of action, Don Quixote, on the other hand, perceives a world bereft with injustice, lacking men of honor to stand up to defend the oppressed and punish the wicked, and he actually attempts to do something about it. One cannot accuse him of complicity by inaction, because he is proactive, making every effort to stand up for what he thinks is right. Furthermore, Don Quixote is steadfast, resolute, and uncompromising in his pursuit of justice – a quality that, despite his madness, embodies the very essence of heroism. None of these virtues, however, can be attributed to the Underground Man. The only issue on which these two such dissimilar characters seem to meet on common ground is their demonstrations of the power of reading to influence one’s thinking. In fact, even Don Quixote would undoubtedly have to agree with the Underground Man when he asserts in his final paragraph, “After all, we have reached the point of almost looking at actual ‘real life’ as an effort, almost as hard work, and we are all privately agreed, that it is better in books” (501).
Works Cited
Primary Sources:
Cervantes, Miguel de. Don Quixote. Trans. Samuel Putnam. The Norton Anthology of World
Masterpieces. New York: W.W. Norton, 1997. 1527-1628.
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Notes from Underground. Sixteen Short Novels. Ed. Wilfrid Sheed. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1985. 415-502.
Secondary Sources:
Allen, John J. Don Quixote: Hero or Fool? A Study in Narrative Technique. Gainesville: U of Florida P, 1969.
Barnhart, Joe E., ed. Dostoevsky’s Polyphonic Talent. Lanham, MD: UP of America, 2005.
Brombert, Victor. “Dostoevsky’s Underground Man: Portrait of a Paradoxalist.” Raritan: A Quarterly Review 15 (1995): 67-81.
Hillon, Mark E., William L. Smith, and Gabriel D. Isaacs. “Heroic/Anti-Heroic Narratives: The Quests of Sherron Watkins.” Tamara: Journal of Critical Postmodern Organization Science (2005).
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