Don Quixote: Dramatic Irony 1 key example

Cervantes employs dramatic irony repeatedly throughout the novel in order to highlight the gulf between Don Quixote’s expectations and reality. Often, he misinterprets the events occurring around him as a result of his obsession with chivalric literature, though the reader is able to perceive his absurd errors and mistakes. When, at the end of his first full day as an adventurer, he approaches an inn that he perceives as a castle, he encounters a group of women and believes that they are aristocratic maidens: 

‘Flee not, nor fear the least affront; for in the order of knighthood which I profess it neither belongs nor behoves to offer any such, much less to high-born maidens, as your presence testifies you to be.’

The girls had been peering at him and trying to make out his face, hidden behind the ill-made visor; but when they heard themselves called maidens, a term so much at odds with their profession, they couldn’t contain their laughter [...] 

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