chivalrous or romantic to extravagance
Don Quixote
was actually a parody
of his creator's interpretation
of a literary craze from before his time,
a criticism,
perhaps become something else
but not what he became,
not some wild idealistic crusade,
but a fool's errand,
a cantankerous sop.
In his darker moments
Marty wondered if that was after all
what he allowed himself to become,
swept up in a romantic delusion,
a comitragic insult
destined to be misremembered,
a gritique of his times
or somesuch nonsense...
Interesting interpretation. And I love the word gritique!
ReplyDeleteAs I noted on your blog, I'm reading Don Quixote for the first time. Yesterday it began to strike me that it might actually be a criticism of the culture at large, its declining interest in literature. Certainly Man of la Mancha suggested it was an Inquisition story, but I don't think it's a criticism of the Inquisition itself, but a general age of decline.
Delete