In a place of La Mancha, the name of which I don't want to recall, there lived not long ago one of those gentlemen with lance on the rack, old shield, worn-out horse, and racing greyhound.
Antiquated Linguistics/Ye Olde Butchered Spanishe: In the original Spanish book, at least, Don Quijote uses outdated forms of speech and pronunciation, like maintaining the initial 'f' in words like 'fermosa' (hermosa), in an attempt to emulate the outdated forms of speech used on chivalry novels.
This shows up in some translations as a Woolseyism: Don Quixote simply uses more archaic vocabulary than everyone else around.
Affectionate Parody: Cervantes was a connoisseur of chivalry novels (evidenced by the famous scene where the priest and the barber go into a lengthy discussion of Don Quixote's library), and his parody of the genre isn't as vicious and destructive as commonly thought.
Altum Videtur: This trope is lampshaded twice by Cervantes:
Another example is lampshaded in Part II, chapter LI. Sancho has been made governor of the "Island of Barataria". In the seventeen century, it was expected that the people who were part of the government and the aristocracy were well educated, and this education included Latin. Don Quixote never uses Latin words in his sentences with Sancho because he is not interested in impress him with his superior knowledge, but he expects that Sancho will learn Latin now that he is a governor.
Arcadia: Don Quixote considers becoming a shepherd instead of a knight at the end. Foreshadowed by the Golden Age speech he gives to the shepherds in the book's beginning; pastoral tropes in general are very important in the novel.
Ascended Fanboy: Quixote takes a more proactive approach than most.
Author Avatar: Cervantes dedicates some chapters of the first part of the novel to “The story of the Captive Captain”, Ruy Pérez de Viedma, a Spanish captain who was prisoner of the Moors. Curiously, this man, like the Priest, claims to know some guy called “de Saavedra”.
Author Filibuster: Parodied and lampshaded. The critics have said that the chivalry books were plagued by a lot of lengthy discourses from different abstract themes, immobilizing the action and discouraging the reader. Cervantes lampshaded this when Don Quixote talks for nearly two pages in the ''"Discourse on The Golden Age"'', Part I, Chapter XI: "All this long harangue (which might very well have been spared)" and satirized it when in the ''"Discourse on Arms and Letters"'', Part I, Chapter XXXVIII, the action really never stops, because all the other characters eat their dinners while Don Quixote talked: "All this lengthy discourse Don Quixote delivered while the others supped, forgetting to raise a morsel to his lips, though Sancho more than once told him to eat his supper, as he would have time enough afterwards to say all he wanted."
A Wizard Did It: Quite literally. Just replace "Wizard" with "Enchanter." When the events of the story veer far enough away from Quixote's account in the style of Knights Errant, Quixote explicitly invokes this trope to explain the discrepancy.
Badass Spaniard: Don Quixote aspires to be one, and actually does pull off some real badassery (e.g., his adventure with the lion).
Beam Me Up, Scotty!: Lampshaded: In the Preface of the Author, Part I, Cervantes’s friend mentions a quote in Latin that a lot of people attributed to Horace, but Cervantes's friend really has done the research, so he mentions "or whoever said it".
There are some cases of this trope in the Spanish pop culture, see some examples in the link.
BittersweetDowner Ending: Don Quixote, after a string of treasons and especially cruel practical jokes, regains his sanity and negates chivalry just before his death, while his squire has ingrained the chivalry lifestyle so deeply that he practically cries for Don Quixote to come back to the adventure.
Canon Immigrant: In a way, Álvaro Tarfe may be one of the first examples, if not the first. He is a character from the non canon sequel written by Avellaneda, who appears at the end of the legitimate second part of the Quijote, the one written by Cervantes, talking to the real Don Quijote and Sancho.
Chuck Cunningham Syndrome: Played perfectly straight: In the Chapter I, Part I, Cervantes mentions the people who lived in Don Quixote’s house: his niece, his housekeeper and a lad who helps them with the field and the marketplace… whom we’ll never see or hear of again. Obviously, Cervantes completely forgotten about this character, and didn't want to write him even in the Second Part of the novel, but in his defense, one of Don Quixote’s themes is about how silly it is to detect errors of continuity in a literary work silly fictional tale.
Cliff Hanger: parodied by the end of Part I, chapter 8: that chapter ends with a dramatic description of Don Quixote and another knight a poor innocent bystander charging at each other... only to have the next chapter start with the narrator telling us that he doesn't have the page in the original manuscript that describes the fight, and wasting three pages telling us how he could get the next part. The critics have said that the cliffhanger was a regular resource of the chivalry books.
Cloud Cuckoo Lander: There is nothing else to call a man who attacks windmills.
Contractual Genre Blindness: Sancho is very aware that the man he is following is pretty insane and often tells him so, but sometimes has to act according to his master's delusions.
Crack is Cheaper: invokedDon Quixote Alonso Quijano was a victim of this phenomenon. At chapter I Part I we learn that he has acquired a lot of chivalry books (almost three hundred), and if you think that the printing had been discovered in Europe only some years ago, it's a considerable feat. But alas! Then as now, his relatives and friends, who certainly think that this hobby is getting out of control, had no second thoughts to send a lot of his books to the bonfire, even if Don Quixote has spent a lot of money in those books:
"and to such a pitch did his eagerness and infatuation go that he sold many an acre of tillage land to buy books of chivalry to read"
It should be noted that just having a few hundred books in the time in which the story was written would have been a huge expense. It's not like they had Barnes and Noble back then.
Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: Although Don Quixote is a loon and almost always beaten and humiliated, sometimes he shows that he's got some real balls and fighting chops (e.g., the lion episode).
Crushing The Populace: When Don Quixote travels to Barcelona, Sancho gets lost at night in a forest whose trees are filled with feet wearing shoes and stockings. Don Quixote calmly explains that the authorities hang outlaws by the twenties and thirties when they catch them.
Daydream Believer: Quixote himself is the archetype of this. And he does not only believe in chivalry books, in Part II, Chapter LXXI, he declares that if he had lived in Homeric times, he could have saved Troy and Carthage by slaying Paris.
Deconstructive Parody: Books of chivalry are ridiculed by having their tropes applied to real, everyday life.
The other trope deconstructed and parodied is Fandumb.
Door Stopper: It's quite a long book, although not obscenely so. The romances of chivalry it parodies tended to be even lengthier.
Fair for Its Day: Several of the attitudes expressed by the characters are enough to make modern sensibilities cringe. Sancho, a man usually associated with being a loyal and amiable sort actually considers taking up selling people as slaves and turning 'black into gold'.
Chapter I, part I: Don Quixote Alonso Quijano has read ''The tale of Don Belianis of Greece:'' and notes that the author has not finished that adventure, so he planned to write a continuation of it, and it would have been a great continuation if not because he abandoned that idea to become Don Quixote (this is not an Informed Ability: In Part I, Chapter II, Don Quixote begins the story of his own heroic exploits, that will undoubtedly write a sage in the future, and in Part I, Chapter XXI, Don Quixote narrates Sancho a perfect summary of the plot and all the typical situations of a chivalry book):
Fanfiction of the book itself. In the 10 years between the first and second part of the novel, there were some "apocryphal" continuations, which Cervantes himself references and afterwards rejects, saying he is the original writer. Which probably makes it one of the oldest examples.
Forgotten Trope: The novel show us an example of the Captivity Narrative when Ruy Pérez de Viedma relates all his biography in “The story of the Captive Captain”, you can see more at Life Embellished.
Genre Killer: Credited with killing off romances of chivalry, although, to be fair, they were already falling out of fashion and pushing Deader than Disco.
Genre Savvy: Apart from the protagonist (who is Wrong Genre Savvy), many other characters are familiar with chivalric tropes and invoke or discuss them. Note that at the end of both volumes, Don Quixote is defeated and forced to return to his village in strict accordance with the laws of the genre.
Gentle Giant: Part I Chapter I reveals that the giant Morgante is one of the Don Quixote Alonso Quixano’s favorite characters, because despite being a giant, he is affable and well bred.
Hero's Muse: The eponymous hero fights for his lady love, whom he refers to as Dulcinea. In his mind, he elevates her to a princess and the most beautiful woman in the world, although she is in reality a peasant girl named Aldonza.
Hikikomori: Somewhat of an Ur Example. Don Quixote seems to be living in his village for years, doing nothing but hunting, reading romances of chivalry, selling his property to pay for them (books were a lot more expensive then) and discussing them with his friends. Justified, because landed gentry of the time was expected to do little else.
Honor Before Reason: The protagonist falls victim to this trope countless times.
Hot Blooded: Don Quixote sure makes a lot of passionate speeches, and charges forward with aplomb, later subverted when he denies chivalry with the same passion.
It's subverted: Don Quixote is not an idiot, and we know it since the very beginning of the novel. He is a very smart, intelligent, well-educated man, who is perfectly normal as long as he is not talking about his obsessions: "apart from the silly things which this worthy gentleman says in connection with his craze, when other subjects are dealt with, he can discuss them in a perfectly rational manner, showing that his mind is quite clear and composed; so that, provided his chivalry is not touched upon, no one would take him to be anything but a man of thoroughly sound understanding." Part I, chapter 30. Of course, when he is indulging his chivalry fantasies... well...
If I Can't Have You: Part II, chapter LX, Claudia Jeronima and Don Vicente Tornellas, from different factions of the civil war that was plaguing Barcelona, secretly fall in love and planned to marry, but one day Claudia Jerónima learned that Don Vicente wants to marry another woman. The next day, overwhelmed and exasperated, she shot him. And then she learns that he never intended to marry any other woman that Claudia.
Impoverished Patrician: Don Quixote Alonso Quijano is an Hidalgo that still has the ancient arms of his ancestors, but has so little money that almost most of them is spent in food. What can he do? He is very smart and talented, so he could work, but if he does, he will lose the few privileges he has as an hidalgo (like, to be excused to pay taxes) . He is poor and bored. It does not help that he spent a lot of them in those silly chivalry books. Sure, they help him with the boredom, and the knight life is certainly exciting, but they are only absurd tales? right?
The Insomniac: Alonso Quijano is a type B, as described in Part I Chapter I: lead by his obsession to read chivalry books, he sleeps less and less while reading more and more and that sends him over the edge.
The landlord shouted to them to leave him alone, for he had already told them that he was mad, and as a madman he would not be accountable even if he killed them all.
Life Embellished: Ruy Pérez de Viedma relates all his biography in “The story of the Captive Captain”. He was a handsome captive captain who wanted to escape the Moors and was helped by a Zoraida, a beautiful moor princess who wanted to convert to Christianity, organized a successful evasion to Spain, was well received by his powerful and rich relatives and married Zoraida. Cervantes was a captive who failed all his evasion intents, his family paid his rescue and always was an Impoverished Patrician.
Literary Agent Hypothesis: Cervantes (only referred in the book as "The second author") says that the book was based on some manuscripts he found and made translate to spanish by an arab translator.
Written by some Arabian named Cide Hamete Benengeli (or Sidi Ahmed bin Engeli, as it would be rendered today) whose first name, "Cide", could be translated as "Mister", and whoselast name is a pun on "berenjena" (eggplant/aubergine).
This trope is parodied, because a lot of chivalry books have his authors claim that they are based in an old manuscript found in an ancient pyramid or another ruined building in some faraway country, written in an exotic language by a wise, famed wizard who favored the hero of the novel. Those claims are made to feign that the chivalry book was inspired by real events. Cervantes twist this and uses it to a comic effect, explaining that the next part of the novel was found in some phamplets and papers (only a few years old) found in Alcana de Toledo (a real city in Spain) in a silk mercer store, written in Arabic (a fairly known language in Spain) by a (foolish) boy who didn't know what was written in them and so sold the papers to Cervantes for peanuts. If we include the funny name of the wizard and the fact that the second author, the translator and Cide Hamete Benengeli are always making comments about the book, we can see that Cervantes want us to admit that all this tale is a long sequence of lies and nonsense... just like all the chivalry books.
Parodied at Chapter XVIII, Part I. Since Homer, the description of the forces and the generals of an army was an important part of the heroic literature, and books of chivalry were pleased to develop it, (Amadis of Gaul has a similar scene). In that chapter, Don Quixote describes what he sees at two contending armies to Sancho, whom only can see… two droves of sheep.
May-December Romance: Don Quixote is around 50; Dulcinea, being an unmarried peasant girl, is probably less than 20. Not that she knows anything about her pretender's interest, though.
Deconstructed with Altisidora and Don Quixote in the second part: Altisidora, a 14 year old maiden at the Duke’s palace, pretends to be in love with Don Quixote. He stoically supports her teasing and mean pranks because he believes she’s in love with him, but he never attempts anything because he wants to be loyal to Dulcinea and is very happy when he abandons her and the palace. Being an honest man, he confesses to Sancho that Altisidora’s felings caused him more confusion than pity, showing us how awkward and foolish would be this kind of relationship in reality.
Meaningful Name: Dulcinea, the name Don Quixote gives to his random Love Interest, could be translated as "Sweety". For the others, see Punny Name. Another example: Doctor Pedro Recio (could be translated as "Doctor Hard Rock"), a doctor who insists that Sancho, as a governor, must have a very strict diet. There are many, many others. The very name itself, quixote (Modern Spanish quijote) means "cuisse", the thighplate of a knightly armour.
In-Universe: This is only one of the Common Fan FallaciesDon Quixote Alonso Quixano falls into in the first chapter of the novel, showing us his descent from Fanboy to Fandumb:
In Part I, Chapter I: The giant Morgante is one of Don Quixote Alonso Quixano’s favorite characters, because despite being a giant, (and in the chivalry books all giants are arrogant and angry), he is affable and well bred… It’s cool, isn’t it? the whole point is that Alonso Quixano think’s this kind of character is original of his beloved chivalry books, but really it’s not.
Only Sane Man: Sancho. And even then, he still willingly follows Quixote and even believes some of the ridiculous things he's told, because he's a simple peasant who doesn't know any better.
Out-of-Character Moment: Lampshaded: In the first part, it's very clear that Sancho Panza is a naïve simpleton. In the second part, Sancho suddenly says very intelligent things to his wife. One of the "narrators" of this tale, seeing this inconsistence, decides to warn us: "The translator of this history, when he comes to write this fifth chapter, says that he considers it apocryphal, because in it Sancho Panza speaks in a style unlike that which might have been expected from his limited intelligence, and says things so intelligent that he does not think it possible he could have conceived them; however, desirous of doing what his task imposed upon him, he was unwilling to leave it untranslated, and therefore he went on to say": This could be considered the beginning of Sancho's slow transformation into a wiser person.
Punny Name: In a 17th century's pun, Quixote means "cuisse", the piece of armor covering the thigh. Modern Spanish form is quijote.
Don Quixote's real name, Alonso Quijano, is a pun on "quijada" (jaw), as he's also a rather skinny guy.
Panza means "belly", specifically a big one. Accordingly, Sancho is a Big Eater.
Rocinante comes from "rocín", still used today in Spanish to name any ugly, skinny or generally bad-quality horse.
Even better: Rocinante is a contraction from "rocín antes", which means that it was a "rocín" before.
Purple Prose: Parodied and Lampshaded: Cervantes achieved the rare miracle of having a florid style that is clearly understandable. But he recognized and denounced this trope:
Another example is obtained in Chapter II, Part I: Don Quixote has begun his lefting his home through a back door and now travels the countryside, thinking abouthow some wise wizard will write the beginning of his adventure. Don Quixote uses a style perhaps not as exaggerated as some examples of purple prose, but certainly is overdeveloped and fancy. You can find the quote at the link of this trope.
Random Events Plot: Given that the first part of the novel is a Deconstructive Parody of Chivalric Romance, and those books were not more than a Knight Errant in the road reacting to the events that happened to him, the first part is this (the second part has a plot in Dulcinea’s rescue). Only that instead of being boring or confusing, Cervantes aimed, and was able, to reproduce the feel of Real Life in his book.
Reality Ensues: This is what happens when an aging nobleman with little fighting skills and crappy armaments imagines himself a knight-errant.
Retcon: In Part II, Cervantes tried to correct some of the most glaring continuity errors of the first book, particularly the mysterious disappearance of Sancho's donkey.
Satire/Parody/Pastiche: Cervantes, both in the prologue and in the the novel itself parodies the way contemporary writers wrote, satirized characters, books, made allusions to many, MANY other works and made a huge impact at the time it was printed.
Scheherazade Gambit: Sancho tries to do this to Quixote to keep him from charging against a watermill (Quixote had something with mills). He forgets about what he was telling.
It's actually even funnier than that: the story he tells Quixote was a common children's story of the time, and is supposed to work like a lullaby, repeating a useless element over and over until the kid goes to sleep.
Screening The Call: If Quixote's reading induced insanity is his Call to Adventure, then the attempt to burn his books is an attempt to Screen The Call.
Serious Business: This is the theme of the novel: The first part, only Don Quixote is affected with the chivalry lifestyle, but in the second, a sizable portion of the Spanish population takes it far more seriously than it should be. There are various examples:
Don Quixote: Type I: The very last stage of Don Quixote Alonso Quixano obsession with chivalry books and the first stage of his true madness (and also to show exactly how out of touch with reality he really is): Part I, Chapter I shows us how important are the chivalry books for him: he will have given his housekeeper and his niece to kick that traitor of Ganelon. (Ganelon was the guy who betrayed Roland at Roncesvalles and who becomes, with Mordred and Judas, one of the great exemplars of treachery for the mediæval period).
The Duke and the Duchess: They spent a lot of money and organize truly Massive Multiplayer Scam (Dulcinea’s enchantment has all the people in their castle, the Insula Barataria involucres all the people of a town) only to laugh at Don Quixote and Sancho.
Shout Out: Hundreds upon hundreds of them, although many would be unrecognizable to the modern reader because of Weird Al Effect.
Chapter I part I mentions Aristotle, philosopher widely regarded as the greatest abstract thinker of Occidental Civilization. Even he has no chance to make sense of the purple prose that plagued Chivalry Books. Also in the Chapter III part II, Don Quixote's opinion about history and poetry reflects the theory exposed in Aristotle's Poetics.
Show Within a Show (in Part 1, a number of short stories told by other characters). For example, "The Ill-Advised Curiosity" is a true novel within the novel, and the priest reads it to all the guests in the inn completely through two chapters of the first part.
Played straight with Aldonza Lorenzo, a young peasant girl from a town called Toboso, who is blissfully unaware that Don Quixote's had a crush on her. She never appeared in neither parts of the novel, only was referred to by other characters.
Parodied by Dulcinea del Toboso, the imaginary love interest of Don Quixote. Since the first part of the novel, Don Quixote imagines her as a beatiful noblewoman who lives in a castle, or in other words, a person completely different from Aldonza Lorenzo. This imaginary entity is a literal ghost, but it's mentioned so many times across the novel that she can be considered the third protagonist besides Don Quixote and Sancho. Besides, in the second part, one of the plot points is Don Quixote's quest to disenchant Dulcinea and to find her at last, even when he knows he imagined her, this is another proof of Don Quixote's madness.
Those Two Guys: Pedro Perez, The priest, and Maese Nicholas, The barber. Better known as "The priest and the barber", two guys from the same town as Don Quixote, who are fond of chivalry books, like Don Quixote, and that are completely sane, unlike Don Quixote, and... well, you would not find any other personality trait in them.
Lampshaded: In the very first paragraph, Don Quixote's literary portrait has the narrator NOT telling us the name of Don Quixote's town, and the narrator admits he doesn't know very well if his name was Quixada, Quesada or Quexana. For the people of the seventeen century, this was an infringement of a very well known rule of the literary portrait, and so they immediately had the real impression that the author was a liar. Also, the original author (Cide Hamete Benengeli) and the Translator (an anonymous moor) comment the text when the plot is being implausible, and the second author (Cervantes), constantly remind us that this is a true history. All these tricks show that Cervantes clearly want the reader realizes that this tale cannot be true.
Not to mention the fact that the so called original author has an Arabic name. At that time in Spain, Arabs were thought to be liars.
" I am in love, for no other reason than that it is incumbent on knights-errant to be so; but though I am, I am no carnal-minded lover, but one of the chaste, platonic sort".
Alfonso de Madrigal, philosopher whose works "have more than twenty volumes.".
would make up".
Where The Hell Is Springfield?: First line: "In a village of La Mancha the name of which I have no desire to recall." It's even lampshaded in the very last chapter: Part II, chapter 74: "Such was the end of the Ingenious Gentleman of La Mancha, whose village Cide Hamete would not indicate precisely, in order to leave all the towns and villages of La Mancha to contend among themselves for the right to adopt him and claim him as a son, as the seven cities of Greece contended for Homer".
Well, it is where the word 'quixotic' comes from...
This trope is severely deconstructed: In the first part, Don Quixote cares more for fulfilling his fantasies than for anyone else. He confides that the farmer Haduldo will stop floggin the boy Andrés and that the Galley slaves he liberates will be grateful enough to make him a favor. (They´re not). His actions make him the original Lord Error Prone. In the second part is even worse: he really acts For Happiness and after some Massive Multiplayer Scam aventures that convince him he is a real Knight Errant he must face the sad fact that he has not helped anyone and therefore, all those Chivalric Romance tropes were Blatant Lies. This is so heartbreaking that he becomes Bored With Insanity and dies. Being called "Quixotic" is not always a good thing.
A Wizard Did It: All over the place in the books Don Quixote reads, so naturally when reality blatantly deviates from how he imagines it, he assumes that enchanters are behind it.
Much more literally, when the priest and the barber burn Don Quixote's books, they tell him that a wizard stole them. Don Quixote goes off to find the wizard.
You Watch Too Much X: Even when Quixote could be the Ur Example and Trope Maker for this trope, in the novel this is a Unbuilt Trope: the Stock Phrase never appears in the novel, and Don Quixote is not Genre Savvy but Wrong Genre Savvy: When in some situation Don Quixote comments about how similar situation have happened in the tales he has read in his chivalry books , the people hearing him don’t answer with “You read too much X”. Even so, there are some examples that are very near to this situation, and the fact that Don Quixote read too much and that drove him to believe that he was a knight errand is the core of the novel, and is lampshaded by the narrator since the very beginning (Chapter I Part I).
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