Don Quixote | Part 2, Chapters 61–63 | Summary

Summary

Part 2, Chapter 61

Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are escorted to Barcelona by Roque and a few of his men. Master and squire are greeted by a horde of cavalrymen led by Don Antonio Moreno, the friend to whom Roque had written. He welcomes Don Quixote to the city and takes master and squire to his home.

Part 2, Chapter 62

At dinner, Sancho Panza and Don Quixote have to disabuse Don Antonio's friends about the lies written in the second, false version of their adventures. Don Antonio then shows Don Quixote a bronze bust atop a marble table he says can "answer any question asked in its ear." They make arrangements to try it out the next day, which ends with Don Quixote being astounded and Sancho Panza less than impressed.

Don Antonio takes Don Quixote on a sightseeing tour of the city while Sancho Panza stays home. Unbeknownst to the lunatic knight, Don Antonio has affixed a sign to his back that says "This is Don Quixote de La Mancha." Everyone on the street says his name aloud, and the Don can't believe how many people know who he is. A subsequent tour of the city takes Don Quixote into a printing shop where he talks with a writer about the publishing business. He notices that they are proofreading The Second Part of the Ingenious Gentleman, Don Quixote de La Mancha.

Part 2, Chapter 63

Don Quixote and Sancho Panza get to sail on one of the king's ships that chases Turkish pirates. Two of the men on the Spanish ship are shot and killed, prompting the captain to capture the Turkish crew and bring them back to land for hanging. The pirate captain is actually a young Moorish woman trying to get back to Spain to find treasure her father buried so she can bring it back to the Turkish king and rescue Don Gaspar Gregorio, the man she loves.

The woman turns out to be Anna Félix, the daughter of Ricote the Moor, Sancho Panza's former neighbor. As fate would have it, Ricote is at the docks, too. Father and daughter embrace and, touched by the heartwarming reunion, the ship's captain pardons Anna. She and her father are taken back to Don Antonio's house, while the renegade she was traveling with goes back to Algeria to rescue her beloved.

Analysis

Muslims had been expelled from Spain at the time of Don Quixote's writing. They were the enemy, and when characters in Don Quixote discuss the Moorish population, they nearly always talk about how brutish and uncivilized they are. Yet when an actual Moorish character is introduced (particularly Zoraida and Anna Félix), that person is attractive, kind, and honorable, and they always have a tale of woe to tell. Cervantes does this to shine a light on the prejudice experienced by Moors in Spain. He couldn't come right out and say that Moors were being treated unfairly—if he had, Don Quixote would never have made it past the Inquisition's censors. Instead, he made every Moorish character entering Spain declare their dedication to Christianity. This satisfied the censors and allowed Cervantes to write sympathetic characters from a different culture. By doing this he is showing that, despite cultural differences, people are all essentially the same.