Extreme Makeover In Don Quixote By Miguel De Cervantes

From 2002 until 2007, the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) produced a popular reality television show in which a team of surgeons, dentists, personal trainers, make-up artists, hair stylists, and fashion advisors worked to alter a person’s looks in an attempt to transform the person’s life and ultimately make his or her dreams come true. The show was called Extreme Makeover. Miguel de Cervantes’s novel Don Quixote is the story of an extreme makeover gone wrong. Though Alonso Quixano tries to recreate himself as a hero and make his dreams come true, in reality he is only a pseudo hero; though he himself looks beyond social class and position to see the worth and potential of others, others view him as a fool; though he perseveres in his attempts …show more content…
However, others do not look for his inner worth; they only see a fool. Don Quixote wants to dedicate his chivalrous deeds to a lady, so he selects Aldonza Lorenzo, a farm-girl in a nearby village. But in Don Quixote’s eyes, she is not a farm girl. Strickler states, “In keeping with his newfound knightly status, he claims that she is a princess and that she is named ‘Dulcinea del Toboso’”(20). Strickler writes, “The idealist Don Quixote sees beyond physical appearances, and she becomes not only beautiful, but ‘pure’ (16). On his first quest when he meets “two young women, of the sort known as ladies of easy virtue,” (p 369), Don Quixote calls them “high-born maidens” (369).” At the end of Chapter 2 when a sow-gelder arrives at the inn playing his pan-pipes, the music convinces Don Quixote that he is dining in a fine castle and “that the salt cod was trout, the bread baked from the whitest wheat-flour, the prostitutes fine ladies and the innkeeper the lord of the castle” (371). He sees the best in both the people and things he encounters. However, those he encounters do not look for the hero qualities in him. The Encyclopedia Britannica gives a laundry list of literary hero qualities that Quixote longs for others to see in him: “magnanimous to his followers . . . , ruthless to his enemies . . ., resourceful and skillful in many crafts . . . , cunning and wise in counsel . . . , a man of action rather than thought . . . [who] lives by a personal code of honor” (Britannica). Instead Cervantes notes, “When the prostitutes hear Don Quixote refer to them as “high-born maidens,” it was “a term so much at odds with their profession, they couldn’t contain their laughter” (371). When the innkeeper, whom Quixote believes to be a governor, sees Quixote’s absurd appearance and hears his bizarre story, he “suspected that his guest wasn’t in his right mind . . . and, to have something to laugh at that night,