Don Quixote INTRODUCTION › THE AUTHOR’S PREFACE Summary

Summary

The narrator addresses the reader directly, admitting that his book is the “child of his brain” but a poor and whimsical offspring born in misfortune rather than in cheerful leisure. He refuses the customary flattering prefaces and explains his difficulty in composing any preface at all, describing his fits of indecision and the occasion when a clever friend interrupts him while he is brooding over what to say.

The friend mockingly rebukes the narrator’s scruples and offers practical, often comic, remedies: fabricate or attribute opening sonnets to illustrious names, paste in familiar Latin maxims with bogus marginal attributions, insert learned annotations to give the appearance of erudition, and pepper the text with famous place-names and classical references to win respect. He insists that such devices will make the work seem authoritative even if it lacks the usual scholarly apparatus, and argues that the true aim is to expose and undermine the books of chivalry by plain imitation and truthful imitation of nature rather than learned paraphernalia. The narrator silently accepts this counsel and presents the forthcoming story of Don Quixote of La Mancha and his squire Sancho Panza as given to the reader without further artifice, closing with a courteous farewell.

Key events

1. Narrator confesses his book is a poor, whimsical offspring born in hardship.
2. He resists writing the customary flattering preface and cannot decide what to say.
3. A clever friend enters, laughs, and challenges the narrator’s hesitation.
4. The friend prescribes rhetorical tricks: fake sonnets, Latin citations, and annotations.
5. Friend argues the book needs none of the learned apparatus because it will attack chivalry.
6. Narrator accepts the advice and offers the tale of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza to readers.

Analysis

This preface establishes tone, voice, and rhetorical strategy for the novel: a self-conscious, ironic narrator who both disavows and performs the literary conventions of his age. By foregrounding artifice—fake sonnets, forged marginalia, spurious citations—Cervantes prepares readers to mistrust appearances and to notice the gap between lofty claims and comic reality. The friend’s pragmatic, satiric counsel both lampoons authorial vanity and models the novel’s method of parody: it will borrow the outward trappings of learned literature to expose the emptiness of chivalric romances. The preface also frames the narrator as fallible and modest, inviting reader complicity in judging the work rather than accepting it on authority; this rhetorical humility is itself a strategy to disarm critics. The voice alternates earnestness and mockery, signaling that the book will mix seriousness and comedy. Finally, the explicit aim—destroying the false authority of books of chivalry—places the forthcoming episodes in an intellectual and cultural project: transformation by imitation and critique, where names, citations, and learned appearances become instruments of satire and narrative play. The Preface thereby prepares readers for a novel that is at once playful, self-referential, and polemical.

Important quotes

“I would this book, as it is the child of my brain, were the fairest, gayest, and cleverest that could be imagined.”

NarratorOpening line declaring the author's wish and introducing his mixed pride and self-deprecation about the work.

“With these and such like bits of Latin they will take you for a grammarian at all events, and that now-a-days is no small honour and profit.”

FriendThe friend's comic counsel to fake learned citations to secure the public's respect for the book.

“it is, from beginning to end, an attack upon the books of chivalry, of which Aristotle never dreamt, nor St. Basil said a word, nor Cicero had any knowledge;”

FriendStatement of the book's declared aim to critique and undermine chivalric romances.

Characters in INTRODUCTION › THE AUTHOR’S PREFACE

• Don Quixote
• Sancho Panza