Feel that with each adventure we’re being shown a different aspect of Don Quixote’s folly.
In the adventure of the windmills, he mistakes windmills for giants. He says wizards changed the giants to windmills.
In the adventure of the sheep flocks, something similar happens but with a twist: he mistakes two approaching flocks of sheep for warring armies — he admits, after having been stoned, they look like sheep– then tells Sancho as soon as the sheep get out of visual range, they will reveal their true human forms again.
In the adventure of the fulling hammers, there’s a bit of an inversion; he at first believes the sound of the hammers to be something terrible and a source of adventure, then discovers them to be mere fulling hammers. (Why didn’t he imagine them to be Giants, like the windmills? In this instance, he goes from imagining something fantastic to realizing the banal reality, unlike the sheep and windmills.)
[Note: it is interesting Quixote encounters industrial things as antagonists. Quixote resists the world’s progress, while acknowledging and respecting this progress.]
With respect to the Helmet of Mambrino, he can see that it *looks like* a barber’s basin, but not that it is that and only that. (That it *looks like that* becomes part of the story of how it’s really not that.)
[Note: Quixote imbues the ordinary with the exceptional.]
In the whipping of the servant incident, he misapprehends the facts of the situation *and* misapplies chivalric code; while in the releasing of the prisoners incident, he seems to apprehend the situation clearly enough, but then he uses bad judgment.
In the Cardenio episodes, Cervantes purposely juxtaposes a truly dejected lover, with Quixote, who’s only pretending to be one. The *truly* mad one is Cardenio, who actually experiences fits of madness, while Quixote is quite rationally, but crazily, pretending to be something he’s not.
In chapters 29 and 31 Quixote’s forced to confront the ill consequences of have “rescued” the whipped servant and having freed the galley slaves (interesting that both these adventures involve the liberation of people who shouldn’t be, or shouldn’t necessarily be). In both cases, he seems clearly to realize the actual case, that he has done something egregiously stupid, but he is unable to draw any broader conclusions from that….
Conclusions. First, on a very perfunctory level, one observes a pattern, of Quixote imagining something that isn’t so, acting on it, often courageously, and then being badly beaten for it, often savagely. Secondly, as a person of my times, I am tempted to ponder whether Quixote’s pursuit of knight errantry might be compared to the pursuit of a political ideology, or conspiracy-theorizing — arranging contradictory facts to fit a preconceived outlook or disposition.
.i`` * ^ / . . . . . ` `~ 