A Twisted Reality: A Comparison of Don Quixote by Cervantes and the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Twain

I beg you, ladies, not to fly, nor to fear any outrage; for it ill fits or suits the order of chivalry which I profess to injure anyone, least of all maidens of such rank as your appearance proclaims you to be. The girls stared at him. Trying to get a look at his face, which was almost covered by the badly made visor. But when they heard themselves called maidens -a title ill-suited to their profession -they could not help laughing, which stung Don Quixote into replying: Civility befits the fair; and laughter arising from trivial causes is, moreover, great folly. I do not say this to offend you nor to incur your displeasure, for I have no other wish than to serve you (Cervantes 38).

This quotation is found in Miguel Cervantes novel Don Quixote and illustrates the difficulty the main character, Don Quixote has with distinguishing between the world's reality and his reality, which is a certain type of dream world for him. This theme of appearances versus reality is an underlying theme throughout Don Quixote and an American novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain. The coming of age experiences and adventures both Don Quixote and Huck Finn have are childlike, each in their own ways. For both Don Quixote and Huck Finn, their coming of age experiences distort reality into what they want that reality to be; they see their experiences at the beginning of each of their journeys as examples of how they view reality and turn them into something that the world's reality is not. In comparison of the two novels Don Quixote by Miguel Cervantes and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, the theme of appearance versus reality in their coming of age experiences are brought forth and made evident through the picaresque novel technique.

One of the prevalent themes in Mark Twain's novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is the theme of coming of age. Many critics have recognized this to be a major theme, as well as showing that through the adventures Huck has throughout the novel, he begins to grow and learn the differences between right and wrong. While he is living in his reality of a child and how they view the world helped to bring about a new reality of a child that is more mature. At the beginning of the novel, Huck begins his series of adventures by killing a pig to make everyone think that he was dead so that he could escape his father. This may seem like something a child might not think of, but his motives were childlike in the essence that he wanted to spend his days being carefree doing whatever he wished. As Huck continues on his adventures, including his moral dilemma about turning Jim in, the Wilkes family visit, and the Phelps farm, the reader can see that Huck is growing in how he views things.

One of the major coming of age dilemma's Huck had to overcome was making a decision about right and wrong. One of the adventures he has where this theme is especially evident in is when Huck, Jim, the Duke and the King go to the Wilkes' home with the Duke and the King are posing as Peter Wilkes' relatives. Towards the end of the time they are at the Wilkes' place, Huck made a decision to take the money that the Duke and King had stolen and give it to Mary Jane instead. "I wish I knowed, but I don't. I had it, because I stole it from them: and I stole it to give to you: and I know where I hid it, but I'm afraid it ain't there no more. I'm awful sorry, Miss Mary Jane, I'm just as sorry as can be; but I done the best I could; I did, honest" (Twain 154). Here, Huck is demonstrating that he understands what honesty and loyalty is, something he did not fully understand at the beginning of the novel, and has done something for another human being without concern for his own welfare.

Additionally, further along in the novel, Huck's coming of age and moral development has been maturing. He has reached a point where he is able to successfully make a decision that demonstrates his moral development and drastically changes him. On pages 168-169, Huck struggles with the decision of whether or not to turn Jim in as a runaway slave. In this dilemma, he has to figure out not what his childlike mind thinks he should do, but what would be the right thing to do. At first, Huck decides to write the letter to Miss Watson, but then begins to think about the letter and how kind Jim had been. "But somehow I couldn't seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind...he was so grateful and said I was the best friend Jim ever had in the world, and the only one he's got now; and then I happened to look around, and see that paper" (Twain 168). Jim's kindness is what changes his mind about sending the letter and he tears it up. Critic Kenneth Lynn, author of Mark Twain and Southwestern Humor summarizes this point:

But in Chapter 15, when Huck plays a prank on Jim by persuading him that the separation in the fog was only a dream, Jim's dignified and moving rebuke suddenly opens up a new dimension in the relation. Huck's humble apology is striking evidence of growth in moral insight. It leads naturally to the next chapter in which Mark Twain causes Huck to face up for the first time to the fact that he is helping a slave to escape. It is as if the writer himself were discovering unsuspected meanings in what he had thought of as a story of picaresque adventure. (as qtd. in Simpson 77)

His childlike morals developed into something much more profound than he started out, with which was just wanting adventure. Extrapolating this line of thought, Miguel Cervantes, author of Don Quixote uses the same type of theme of appearance versus reality through coming of age in his novel. Even though Don Quixote, the main character in the novel, is an older gentleman, he also has much difficulty distinguishing between the world's reality and his own reality in his coming of age experiences through his adventures. Similar to Huckleberry Finn's self-discovery, Don Quixote's path of self-discovery ends by him coming of age in that he assumes an identity in the world's perception of reality. He assumes this identity by denying that he is Don Quixote, and declares he is the distinguished gentleman he was in real life, Alonso Quixano. In the novel, Don Quixote has many adventures that show his idealized fantasy world. This fantasy world is one where he is a knight errant with goals to be with Dulcinea, to be chivalric, and to help others. Cervantes describes Quixote's feelings on this fantasy world.

In fact, now that he had utterly wrecked his reason he fell into the strangest fancy that ever a madman had in the whole world. He thought it fit and proper, both in order to increase his renown and to serve the state, to turn knight errant and travel through the world with horse and armor in search of adventures, following in every way the practice of the knights errant he had read of, redressing all manner of wrongs, and exposing himself to chances and dangers, by the overcoming of which he might win eternal honor and renown. Already the poor man fancied himself crowned by the valor of his arm, at least with the empire of Trebizond; and so, carried away by the strange pleasure he derived from these agreeable thoughts, has hastened to translate his desires into action. (Cervantes 33)

It would have been fine if he decided to act this way when it was proper to be a knight errant, but the problem with this reality is that it was centuries too late for him to be riding a skinny horse, wearing bent armor and acting as though he was going to conquer the world. In his reality it seemed perfectly feasible to act that way, but according to that society it was not. Society's reality was to have their heads out of the clouds and to not constantly live life as though the world was a storybook. Giovanni Papini, the author of the book Four and Twenty Minds says "The voluntary deformation of objects has its beginning in arbitrary idealism, and has come to be recognized as an essential characteristic of all creative art. It is that process by which you see only what you want to see, represent only what you want to represent, changing, exaggerating, or reducing even that, according to the internal necessities of the creative will" (Papini 6). In Don Quixote's "childlike" mindset he was distorting reality and turning it into something it was not. This is because he would change the way he viewed reality to make that reality be what he wanted it to be, the knight errant world.

Continuing with Don Quixote's distortion of reality, he becomes so absorbed in it that he no longer sees that he is in his own dream world, and that causes his dream world to become his living reality. An excellent example of this is the windmills scene in chapter 8 in which he thinks windmills have been enchanted and turned into giants, which must be challenged to fight:
At that moment they caught sight of some thirty or forty windmills, which stand on that plain, and as soon as Don Quixote saw then he said to his squire: 'Fortune is guiding our affairs better than we could have wished. Look over there, friend Sancho Panza, where more than thirty monstrous giants appear. I intend to do battle with them and take all their lives. With their spoils we will begin to get rich, for this is a fair war, and it is a great service to God to wipe such a wicked brood from the face of the earth.' (Cervantes 68)

Don Quixote proceeds to attack the windmills, with his goal of killing them. The problem with this is that they are windmills, not humans. When Sancho informs him of this fact, after Don Quixote is thrown off the face of the windmill, Don Quixote declares that the windmill (the giant according to him) was enchanted and had turned magically into a windmill. Because he is trapped in his fantasy world he cannot tell the difference between the world's reality and his fantasy world, his reality.

As the plot in the story progresses, Don Quixote begins to see differences between his reality and the world's reality. This realization demonstrates his coming of age; in other words, his understanding that his view of reality, the fantasy world he lived in, was distorted. This is somewhat demonstrated in Don Quixote's encounter with the Knight of Mirrors in chapter 14. The Knight of Mirrors himself is a symbol of both change and that one's perspective reality is not always how it really is. Don Quixote sees himself as a knight errant; however, the fight Don Quixote has with the Knight of Mirrors symbolizes Don Quixote's mirroring his own reality. This fight duplicates his own reality because a mirror is used to show the beholder what the image looks like; but on the same scale, the Knight of the Mirrors is there to show Don Quixote his reality is distorted. Don Quixote has a distorted view, which in turn distorts his reflection. By the same token, by losing the battle with the Knight of Mirrors is symbolic of the battle he is losing, his fantasy reality, to the reality of the world.

Furthermore, as Don Quixote's quest for adventure continued to the end of his life, his coming of age experience is completed just before he dies. Don Quixote summarized this very well when he is lying on his deathbed:
My judgment is now clear and free from the misty shadows of ignorance with which my ill starved and continuous reading of those detestable books of chivalry and obscured it. Now I know their obsurdities and deceits...I should like to meet it (death) in such a manner as to convince the world that my life has not been so bad as to leave me the character of a madman... 'Congratulate me, good sirs, for I am Don Quixote de la Mancha no longer, but Alonso Quixano...Now I am the enemy of Amadis de Gaul and of all the infinite brood of his progeny. Now all profane historieis of knight errantry are odious to me. I know my folly now, and the peril I have incurred from the reading of them... Now, by God's mercy, I have learnt from my own bitter experience and abominate them.' (Cervantes 935-936)

By Don Quixote saying this, he is demonstrating that he now understands, through the series of adventures he went on and what he eventually learned from them, that he was living a dream world. That dream world was part of a reality he desire to live in, and, as a result became so intertwined with his imagination that he was unable to separate the real from the fictitious. Even though he enjoyed his experiences while they lasted, he dislikes them now because he realizes how much trouble it was for him to live in a separate reality. That separate reality harmed him more than assisted him or improved his life, but it made him who he was. Vladimir Nabokov, a teacher of literature at Wellesley College and Cornell University while alive, summarizes Don Quixote's journey from seeing only his self-made reality to a grounded reality:
Don Quixote recants at the end of the book, in its saddest scene, it is neither from gratitude to his Christian God, nor is it under divine compulsion -but because it conforms to the moral utilities of his dark day. An abrupt surrender, a miserable apostasy, this, when on his deathbed he renounces the glory of the mad romance that made him what he was. (Nabokov 18)

It is true the reality Don Quixote lived in made him who he was, and some say this because they would rather him die still believing he was a knight errant and going on adventures rather than coming to an understanding of what had happened in his life.

Don Quixote by Miguel Cervantes and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain are two novels that discuss the issue of how individuals grow into more mature individuals through a series of adventures that demonstrate their progress. Two modern day examples of this process of realization can be found in the movies Toy Story 2 and The Wizard of Oz. Woody, a main character for Toy Story 2, through his adventures learns the importance of friendship, what is grounded reality and what is the idealized reality of life. Similarly, through Dorothy's journey to over the rainbow in the Wizard of Oz, she learns the difference between the world's reality, which was home and her wanting something better than the reality she was living in, the land somewhere over the rainbow, Oz. In her coming of age, she finally understands that "there is no place like home," where home could very well be representative of the reality of the world. It is important for individuals to remember that being a dreamer is a good thing and it can bring about good things that help the person grow, but when those dreams become a distorted view of reality then it has the opposite effect. Vladimir Nabokov summarizes this very well:
Reality and illusion are interwoven in the pattern of life. 'How,' he remarks to his squire, 'how is it possible for you to have accompanied me all this time without coming to perceive that all the things that have to do with knight errantry appear to be mad, foolish, and fantastic...Not that they are so in reality: it is simply that there are always a lot of enchanters going about among us, changing things and giving them a deceitful appearance, directing them as suits their fancy, depending upon whether they wish to favor or destroy us. (Nabokov 17)

Works Cited

Cervantes, Miguel. Don Quixote. New York: Penguin Books, 1950.
Nabokov, Vladimir. "Structural Matters." Lectures on Don Quixote. Ed. Fredson Bowers. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983. 27-50.
Papini, Giovanni. "Four and Twenty Minds." Literature Criticism from the 1400 to 1800. Ed. Ernest Hatch Wilkins. 6 (1922): 256-275.
Smith, Henry Nash. "A Sound Heart and a Deformed Conscience." Twentieth Century Interpretations of Adventure of Huckleberry Finn. Ed. Claude Simpson. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1968. 71-81.
Twain, Mark. "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn." The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Vol. 2. 5th ed. Ed. Nina Bayn, et al. New York: Norton, 1998. 28-216.