Jonathan William Wade and Dr. Dale Pratt, Spanish and Portuguese

Nearly four hundred years after the publication of the first part, I assumed the daunting task of writing about Don Quixote de la Mancha. With literally thousands of publications related to Cervantes’s masterpiece, I knew that writing an honors thesis about Don Quixote would be challenging. However, I felt that I had something valuable to contribute to this eternal literary discussion. When I first read the novel the quixotic spirit fascinated me. There was something about Don Quixote’s commitment to knight errantry that resonated with my own commitments in life. Beyond the obvious madness of our knight, there was an element of sacredness that captivated me as a reader.

When I first read Don Quixote de la Mancha for a Spanish class in 2001 I saw many parallels between Don Quixote and Jesus Christ. Although this connection was undoubtedly a reflection of my own personal interest in Christianity, I felt as though the novel provided compelling evidence for linking the two figures. This was the beginning of my project. As I continued my investigations I discovered that I was not alone in my Quixote/Christ perspective. The Russian novelist Dostoevsky and the Spanish scholar Miguel de Unamuno shared a similar view of Don Quixote and Jesus Christ. With this part of my research well on its way, my mentor encouraged me to step away from the Quixote/Christ theme and look at the sacredness of Don Quixote in a more general sense.

Mircea Eliade’s book, The Sacred and the Profane, provided the theoretical lens I needed to understand Alonso Quijana’s conversion into Don Quixote. According to Eliade, sacredness is defining and living by a specific center point in life, a fixed orientation. As a result of eating, drinking, and sleeping chivalric romances, a transformation occurs within Alonso Quijana that sets in motion his sacred life. These internal changes initiate his metamorphoses from the dead to the living, the profane to the sacred. This conversion requires a complete change of identity. Consequently, he changes his appearance, his name, his inspiration, and his mission. All of these changes represent his commitment to a sacred existence.

With the sacred life of Don Quixote defined both generally and specifically, I dedicated the remainder of my research to establishing the religious context in which the book was written. The religion of Golden Age Spain was very complex. During this time, Spain overflowed with Christianity, Mysticism, Erasmus philosophy, the Inquisition, honor, blood purity, Reformation, and the continual influence resulting from eight hundred years of Muslim rule. As a result, Cervantes could not avoid promoting and attacking these various themes, which appear on nearly every page of his novel. Defining religion in the golden age was an essential step in the writing process because it created the foundation necessary for constructing a sacred interpretation of the novel.

This project challenged me in many different ways. First, I had to face the difficulty of research. Only after a great deal of investigation was I able to feel confident about the worth of my topic and the singularity of its application. I had to accept the fact that although I had searched intensively to find publications related to my work, I would not be able to read everything ever written on sacredness and religion in the Quixote. My advisor helped me to identify the primary works related to this topic and ultimately to feel the confidence necessary to proceed with my ideas. Another obvious difficulty was defining my ideas enough that I could actually say something valuable, but not so much that I felt claustrophobic in the narrowness of my topic. Once again it was my thesis advisor who helped me overcome this problem. He encouraged me to expand the scope of my thesis beyond Christianity and more towards sacredness in general. With this additional insight I was able to set up my topic perfectly with a review of religion in Golden Age Spain, leading to Eliade’s book The Sacred and the Profane, and finally concluding with the parallels between Christ and Quixote.

Thanks to the ORCA grant I was able to avoid many other challenges. Finding time to write and research is always difficult, but with the monetary assistance from the grant I was able to concentrate more on my studies and less on work and other financial matters. I was also able to purchase a laptop with the money I received. Since my wife and I previously did not have a computer, this was a very valuable addition to our home during the writing process. Without the laptop it would have been much more difficult, if not impossible, to complete my honors thesis and graduate by August. The University Honors Program was the best experience of my academic career, and I do not think I could have completed all of the necessary requirements for honors graduation had ORCA not supported me.

As far as the future is concerned, I am currently a Masters student at BYU working on a MA in Spanish literature. My honors thesis advisor, who is now my graduate advisor, is helping me to publish and/or present part of my honors thesis. It will take time to craft the thesis in such a way as to be ready for a conference reading or publication, but that has always been and continues to be our goal. As I advance in my graduate program I believe my experiences writing my honors thesis will both indirectly and directly affect my future writing and scholarly work