Every person who meets Don Quixote during the first third of the book sees madness in Don Quixote, including Sancho Panza. And indeed, between tilting at windmills, seeing a barber’s basin as the Golden Helmet of Mambrino, and freeing galley slaves who were sentenced for crimes against the King’s justice (and who then turned around and beat both DQ and SP), the kindest words that can be used about him are that he has very poor judgment and little common sense.
Don Quixote recognizes no madness in himself, and so when he desires to bring even greater glory and fame upon himself by performing penance in the mountains, he determines that the way to do it is to imitate the greatest of chivalric knights in literature, “playing the part of one who is desperate, a fool, a madman;” and he bids Sancho not to advise him “to abandon so rare, so felicitous, so extraordinary an imitation.”
In essence, the episode of performing penance in the Sierra Morena is play-acting on the part of Don Quixote; under that same umbrella, his whole imitation of chivalrous knights and their lives and deeds is a type of play-acting, with Don Quixote trying to shape the world he lives in to be more like the Golden Age of Chivalry, which is delineated in so much detail in the romances he reads.
Is it madness that we try to shape our own worlds through our actions, either positive or negative? One person provides free legal services to poor people in an attempt to shape their world on his model of justice; another person becomes a suicide bomber to shape the world according to her beliefs. Each of these might perceive the others’ actions as madness, yet believe that their own actions are perfectly logical and sensible with the context of their world view.
At the inn where Don Quixote and his friends meet with the captive and the Lela Zoraida, DQ speaks to the assembled group, telling them that arms are superior to letters (i.e., being a knight or soldier is superior to being a priest or scholar). “The purpose and aim of letters . . . is to maintain distributive justice, and give each man what is his, and make certain that good laws are obeyed.” Whereas the purpose of arms “is peace, which is the greatest good that men can desire in this life. . . . This peace is the true purpose of war, and saying arms is the same as saying war.”
Cervantes describes DQ’s arguments in favor of arms and war as rational, “and no one listening to him at that moment could think of him as a madman”.
However, isn’t war just another way of trying to shape our world? If Don Quixote is mad to think that chivalry is an appropriate way to shape his world, isn’t he equally mad to think that war is an appropriate way to shape his world? Isn’t war just chivalry expanded to include a country or regime rather than just a single enemy knight?
The claim that peace is the purpose of war sounds mad to me.
