Good-Bye Don Quijote!

As I think I've made rather clear in this class I don't enjoy this book at all. But, having said that, I can appreciate certain parts of the book and I guess I understand why it's considered such a literary classic. My primary “appreciation” is what Cervantes does for women in the book and the roles he allows them to play. What he did for these women, by giving them free-thinking, independent and speaking roles was something very very controversial for his time. This sort of “breaking the rules” about the roles of women is probably one of the few things I can actually say that I do like about this novel. I won't lie, unless I'm assigned to read it again I probably never will, but I can say that Don Quijote was one of the first novels to portray women's “inward thoughts” as part of an outward story (I'd argue that La Celestina also attempted to do this). So even though I don't like this novel at all, I can appreciate what it did for not only the Spanish Language, but for the role of women. (Not saying that women all of a sudden turned out to be these women in the novel,but it certainly “gave the hopes for the future”).