Imagine picking up a novel in hopes of an entertaining read. You open it, read the first paragraph and realize that the main character is …
… your!
How would it feel?
This could be a good starting point for your students’ discussion. After all, kids are likely to point out that stranger things happen today. One could very well appear on someone’s blog, in a viral video, or even on television without expecting it, often in the most disgusting way.
The discussion could also feature two of the most iconic figures in world literature: Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, the protagonists of Miguel de Cervantes’s 17th-century novel Don Quixote. They went through exactly this experience.
At the beginning of Part 2 of Don Quixote, the deluded “Knight of the Pitiful Figure” and his down-to-earth squire discover that they are the heroes of Part 1 of the novel and have to live with the consequences of fame. . Later, in Part 2, they discover (as did Cervantes, to their dismay) that an anonymous pirate has already published a fake second part trying to capitalize on the success of Part 1. Through his characters’ reactions to this spurious work Cervantes masterfully ridicules the version of his unknown rival. Don Quixote and Sancho come to life all the more vividly when contemplating their own presence in works of fiction.
As for poor Cervantes, he discovered that fame was not all that it seemed. He wrote Don Quixote in large part because he was broke and hoped it would be a bestseller. Once it was in print, it “went viral” (as we might say today), appearing in all sorts of pirated editions. Cervantes wrote a real blockbuster, okay, and his name was known internationally, but he was left penniless. At least his fame lasted much longer than the 15 minutes allotted to most of us!
“A classic is something that everyone wants to have read and no one wants to read,” as Mark Twain once observed. Now, I have read Walter Starkie’s translation of over 1000 pages twice. But I admit that this huge volume is not for everyone, much less for children in sixth through tenth grade. Still, how can someone go through life without getting acquainted with Don Quixote and Sancho Panza? They have been portrayed in drawings, paintings, sculptures, plays, movies, songs, symphonic plays, operas, and a Broadway musical. Cervantes’s book has enriched the language itself with words and phrases like “quixotic” and “tilting the windmills.”
So how can you introduce your students to Don Quixote and Sancho in a single class period? You could let them write a story or improvise a scene to show what it would be like to suddenly become the main character in a story. You could let that experience play out or even make a video. I was delighted to tackle this problem for READ magazine in 2006. My answer is, do it spectacularly.
