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The Don
Quixote Study Guide Home |
Narrative Structure
and Metafiction:
The Cervantic Craft
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The narrative structure of Don Quixote is highly complex. At times, the reader feels unsure what is real and what has been invented by Cervantes. This is because the story is metafictive. It is a story within a story within a story within a story again. (The prefix "meta" is Greek for "again" meaning literally, "fiction again.")
If anything, the narrative structure mirrors the complexities of the Don Quixote character himself. Just as Don Quixote blurs reality with imagination, Cervantes does the same.
Volume One of Don Quixote was published in 1605. After its success, a man by the name of Alonzo Fernández de Avellaneda decided to cash in on Cervantes's success and write a Volume Two. (This was not uncommon during the Renaissance.) However, his preface to the "phony" Volume Two was insulting: it mocked Cervantes's crushed left hand (a battle wound), mocked Cervantes's old age, and claimed Cervantes to be irritable and without friends.
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Cervantes was furious and began writing the "true" Volume Two. In this Volume Don Quixote has discovered that someone has written a story of his life (which we have read as "Volume One." He also discovers that Avellaneda has written another version of his life story. Part of his quest in Volume Two is to discover how his life has been represented. The character is conscious of the author and is desperately searching for answers as he meets characters who have read both the Cervantes Volume One and the Avellaneda Volume Two.
What follows is a visual representation of the narrative structure of Don Quixote:
Volume One
| Volume One of Don Quixote is of course written by Miguel de Cervantes. | Cervantes |
| As Cervantes tells us, the original story of Don Quixote was written in Arabic by Sidi Hamid Benengali. (This is not true, of course--pure Cervantic invention.) Cervantes tells us that Benengali isn't the most accurate of historians. Notice Cervantes calls Benengali a historian--suggesting that Don Quixote/Alonso Quixana was real. | Cervantes
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| Cervantes tells us that Benengali's story was then translated into Spanish by an unnamed translator who, as Cervantes says, also made errors as he translates Benengali's story. | Cervantes
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| The story is then told to us by "Cervantes" (a fictional Cervantes--Cervantes's representation of himself). "Cervantes" has uncovered the translated manuscripts of Sidi Hamid Benengali and proceeds to tell us the story of Don Quixote, not as Benengali "wrote" it (because Benengali's story has errors) but to build off of Benengali's story and fix the errors and fill in the gaps. We have been four times removed from our original author. And at the same time, because our author is meant to be our narrator (Cervantes the author vs. "Cervantes" the narrator) we are confused as to what is real and what is made up. | Cervantes
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This is the narrative structure of Volume One--rather confusing and challenging. It is after Volume One is published that Avellaneda publishes his Volume Two to Don Quixote. Cervantes responds with his own Volume Two.
Volume Two
| Once again, Cervantes begins with the same initial set-up where our narrator "Cervantes" is four times removed from our original author. " | Cervantes
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| However, many of the characters in Volume Two have read Volume One. Thus, these characters are in a story called Don Quixote Volume Two written by Cervantes, originally "written" by Benengali, translated into Spanish and told by "Cervantes" which refers to Don Quixote Volume One written by Cervantes, originally "written" by Benengali, translated into Spanish and told by "Cervantes!" Where does fiction stop and reality begin? | Cervantes
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Keep in mind that several characters in Volume Two are aware of Avellaneda's text, so the structure is even more complex than I have here.
John Barth has named metafictive narratives that seem to go on indefinitely, as we have here, "the literature of exhaustion," characterized by the reader not knowing where the narrative's first level really is. Where is the starting point? At what point have we moved into fictional grounds? These seem to be the very questions that Cervantes asks us in his complex narrative.