Don Quixote: Irony 8 key examples

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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In a scene that exemplifies situational irony, Don Quixote spends so much time contemplating his future victories that he makes slow progress and accomplishes nothing in his first day as a knight errant: 

He strung these absurdities together with many others, all in the style of those that he’d learned from his books. This made his progress so slow, and the sun was rising so fast and becoming so hot, that his brains would have melted, if he’d had any. He rode on almost throughout that day and nothing happened worth mentioning, which reduced him to despair because he was longing for an early encounter with someone on whom he could test the worth of his mighty arm.

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Cervantes employs verbal irony and numerous allusions in a scene in which an innkeeper decides to “humour” Don Quixote after recognizing that the knight isn’t “in his right mind”:

The innkeeper, who, as I’ve said, was something of a wag, and had already suspected that his guest wasn’t in his right mind [...] decided to humour him; so he said that he was quite right to pursue these objectives [...] and that he himself in his younger days had followed the same honourable profession, roaming through different parts of the world in search of adventure, without omitting to visit such districts as Percheles and Islas de Riarán in Malaga, Compás in Seville, Azoguejo in Segovia, Olivera in Valencia, Rondilla in Granada, Playa in Sanlúcar, Potro in Cordova and Ventillas in Toledo. 

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In a scene suffused with both situational and verbal irony, a farmer brutally punishes a young boy as a result of Don Quixote’s attempt to help the boy. Previously, Don Quixote encountered the farmer flogging the boy. Outraged, he threatened the farmer and demanded that he pay the boy the wages he is owed. After Don Quixote leaves, however, the farmer swiftly resumes the beating: 

‘Come here, my son, I want to pay you what I owe you, just as that righter of wrongs has ordered.’ 

‘I swear you will, too,’ said Andrés, ‘and you’ll do well to obey that good knight’s commands, God bless him, because he’s such a brave man [...]' 

‘And I swear I will, too,’ said the farmer, ‘but, since I’m so very fond of you, I think I’ll increase the debt first, just so as to increase the repayment.’ And seizing him by the arm, he tied him back to the evergreen oak and flogged him half dead.

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Cervantes employs verbal irony and a simile in a scene in which Don Quixote forbids Sanch Panzo from aiding him if he is engaged in combat with another knight, as he claims that it is forbidden in the rules of chivalry for a commoner to attack a knight: 

‘You can be sure, sir,’ replied Sancho, ‘of being fully obeyed there [...] Though I do have to say that when it comes to defending myself I’m not going to take much notice of those there laws of yours, because divine and human justice both let anyone defend himself against attack.’ 

‘I do not disagree in the slightest,’ replied Don Quixote, ‘but as regards assisting me against knights, you must keep your natural impetuosity under control.’ 

‘I’ll do that all right,’ replied Sancho. ‘I’ll keep that particular promise as strictly as the Sabbath.’

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After a goatherd points out that Don Quixote has confused chivalric literature for reality, Quixote responds with rage and the two fight. Though Sancho attempts to break up the fight and protect Quixote, he is prevented from doing so by a canon, a priest, and several peace officers, who wish for the fight to continue for their own amusement, exemplifying situational irony: 

As soon as Don Quixote found himself free he jumped on top of the goatherd, who, bloody-faced and pounded by Sancho’s feet, was crawling over the tablecloths in search of a knife with which to take some gory revenge [...] and then the barber intervened to enable the goatherd to climb on top of Don Quixote, at whom he flailed away [...] The canon and the priest were laughing fit to burst, the peace-officers were jumping with joy, everyone was cheering the two men on as dogs are cheered on when they’re fighting.

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In a heavily satirical scene in which Don Quixote, the priest, and the barber debate about politics, Cervantes alludes to historical and mythological figures associated with statecraft and governance: 

And as the conversation developed they came to the subject that is sometimes called reason of state and methods of government, and they all corrected this abuse and condemned that one, and reformed one custom and forbad another, and each of the three men turned into a new legislator, a present-day Lycurgus or a modern Solon; and they subjected society to such radical reforms that anyone would have thought they’d taken it to a forge and brought away a different one  [...]

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At the end of the novel, Don Quixote returns to his village and informs his friends and loved ones that he is no longer "mad." Abandoning the persona of "Don Quixote de la Mancha," he returns to his original identity of "Alonso Quixano" and hopes not for fame and glory but only to earn the nickname "the Good." In a scene saturated with situational irony, his friends believe that he is simply "in the grips of some new madness": 

‘You must congratulate me, my good sirs, because I am no longer Don Quixote de la Mancha but Alonso Quixano, for whom my way of life earned me the nickname of “the Good”. I am now the enemy of Amadis of Gaul and the whole infinite horde of his descendants; [...] now I acknowledge my folly and the peril in which I was placed by reading them; now, by God’s mercy, having at long last learned my lesson, I abominate them all.’  When the three heard all this they were certain that he was in the grips of some new madness.

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