Self-Affirming Textualality

I know, I know. Too much Quixote. But I realized something that I hadn't previously; the book itself is an extension of the ideas encapsulated within Don's mind. Don is constantly attributing truth as an important factor for nobility and chivalrous values. One major moral, I think, is that truth is not necessarily better than fiction. D.Q. thinks the stories in his books to be real, an obvious folly in the world in which he lived, but Cervantes tells us that so fantastic and unrealistic a story, told about Don Quixote is a factual account not to be taken as fancy (or at least he tells us so in the first part of the book).

For the sake of the story itself, Cervantes writes it as if were one of Don's own books--an epic story of a knight errant, but Quixote is decidedly not one (as far as I've read, I'm still reading the second book), and the general unbelievability of his madness, and the serendipitous nature in which everyone stopping at the inn that fateful knight (when the barber and curate tried to take Don home) knowing each other in some way or another.

There is the chapter in which Donny Q argues against the pedantic canon's claims that the romantic tales of chivalry are nothing more than fiction meant for writers to write about fantastic and impossible characters. Of course, Don is offended and talks of chivalry being didactic and true, while, ironically and hypocritically, Cervantes' story is, for all intents and purposes, fictitious.