Noble Knights

I recently had some time off work that allowed me to put a few check marks on my list of books to read and shows to watch. Without planning it, I found myself simultaneously making my way through three stories of a wandering knights errant (of sorts) and their tribulations in facing their assorted and sundry foes. Don Quixote is the forefather of the modern novel and invented a new type of literature, and I’m reasonably sure someone somewhere also has noticed that this is an important book. I don’t want to talk about what makes Don Quixote such a legendary book, instead I’m going to take up a few electrons to compare the protagonist Don Quixote to a few modern legends. DQ’s flawed worldview has as its foundation, and unshakable belief that chivalry is alive and that he is a great knight destined by god to face villainy and foes at every turn. Much of the comedy of the book comes from juxtaposing his perception of the world with the reality of the world. Cervantes uses that juxtaposition as a mechanism to illustrate a few important things to us readers. Don Quixote, himself a fool for believing in chivalry, is at odds with almost everyone else who inhabits his world in that they don’t believe in knights errant and the valor of chivalry. He is the only insane man spouting chivalric nonsense in an otherwise reasonable world. By contrast, Geralt of Rivia, the protagonist of the Witcher, doesn’t believe in fairy tales, chivalry, or happy endings, despite living in a world where everyone else does. He is the lone voice of reason in an unreasonable world. Don Quixote is brilliant because for the first time in literary history, it combines a fictional character in a realistic world. The Witcher is a few centuries late but depicts the converse of Don Quixote where a realistic character is placed into a fictional world. The third chivalric knight that I’ve had my eye on as of late is the Mandolorian from the new Star Wars series. The Mandolorian is written as a cookie cutter copy of a spaghetti western hero, a capable gunslinger does the right thing despite the personal costs. The Mandolorian starts out as a skeptic like Geralt but learns to be naive like Don Quixote. The character arc that the Mandolorian follows starts grounded in rational decisions and good sense, and ends up throwing it all away and embarking on an epic adventure against all odds for the sake of a moral imperative. No matter how shiny the armor, the knight facing the dragon loses in the real world but wins in the fictional one. The contrast between these worlds is the core theme of all three of these stories. Geralt can never beat the dragon because he is a ‘real world’ character fighting fictional foes, Don Quixote will always beat the dragon because even though there aren’t real dragons, he is an ‘undefeatable’ knight errant, the Mandolorian would lose to the dragon at first, but later becomes the legendary hero that can vanquish a dragon against the odds.

All of these stories tell us about our own story. We are real characters in a real world, in a very real story. We can’t slay the dragon, but the good news is there isn’t a dragon in our world to slay. Our dragons exist in the parallel worlds to our own. As Kurt Vonnegut tells us, “We are who we pretend to be.”, so when we pretend to be knights, we can slay our imaginary dragons. Our relationship with fiction is blurred at times. Sometimes we feel like we are a part of a world that doesn’t exist, sometimes we place ourselves in situations that won’t ever happen, sometimes we are the heroes of perfect stories. And yet, all of those times we know that we are still home, safe in our armchairs in front of our TVs or with our books in our laps. The Mandolorian, Geralt of Rivia, and Don Quixote are all characters that masterfully dance along the line between our world and theirs. The approaches differ, but they each highlight that a rift exists and use the interplay between reality and fiction to create tension, humor and intrigue in their stories.