William Egginton , ‘The Man Who Invented Fiction: How
Cervantes Ushered in the Modern World ‘, 2016:
“....Predictably, famously, Don Quixote does not heed his
good squire’s commonsense admonitions, but instead charges ahead, spearing the
enormous sail of a windmill’s arm with his lance and being lifted, horse and
all, off the ground and smashed back down in a miserable, aching heap. Sancho’s
reaction to his mishap, though, is different from those that greeted all Quixote’s
previous antics. Where the others treated Quixote as a spectacle,
entertainment, or a nuisance, Sancho responds with compassion. Seeing his
master lying next to his fallen horse and shattered lance, Sancho hurried to help him as fast as his donkey could carry him,
and when he reached them he discovered that Don Quixote could not move because
he had taken so hard a fall with Rocinante.
“God save me!” said Sancho. “Didn’t I tell your grace to
watch what you were doing, that these were nothing but windmills, and only
somebody whose head was full of them wouldn’t know that?”
From the limited outlook of his own simplicity, Sancho sees
his master fail, sees the calamitous consequences of his delusions, and yet
decides to accept him despite them: “‘It’s in God’s hand,’ said Sancho. ‘I
believe everything your grace says, but sit a little straighter, it looks like
you’re tilting, it must be from the battering you took when you fell.’”
In the space of a few pages, what started as an exercise in
comic ridicule and, as the narrator insists on several occasions, a satirical
send-up of the tales of chivalry, has taken on an entirely different dimension;
it has begun to transform itself into the story of a relationship between two
characters whose incompatible takes on the world are bridged by friendship,
loyalty, and eventually love...”
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