Don Quixote: Safety Blanket Armor

"The first thing he did was to refurbish some rusty armor that had belonged to his great grandfather and had lain moldering in a corner. He cleaned it and repaired it as best he could, but he found one great defect: instead of a complete helmet there was just the simple morion. This want be ingeniously remedied by making a kind of visor out of pasteboard, and when it was fitted to the morion, it looked like an entire helmet." pg. 59

The joke is on Don Quixote, literally. Step one in becoming a knight? Get some armor! This moment happens so early on that it is almost forgettable. If he did not have to stop to fix his helmet and the embarrassment it caused from time to time, we might forget he had to get his hands on the armor in the first place. We take this moment pretty straight forward; crazy guy decides he is a knight and gets dressed up for some LARPing. But I see it a little bit differently if I stop to think about what that moment might have meant to Quixote. The whole point is that Quixote longs for the romantic tales he grew up reading, he longs for it so much that he decides to life out his DnD character in real life. Would not someone looking for that level of escape elicit some help these days? Quixote is putting on more than just physical armor, he is putting on the armor that is going to protect him from all the naysayers. Like Linus' blanket in The Peanuts, or Tommy Pickle's trusty screwdriver in The Rugrats, Don Quixote is wearing his comfort. Considering that armor is a form of actual protection, it makes sense that Quixote extends the protection to his delusion.

In modern times we consider this level of fixation on any subject (unless it is making someone money...) a bad thing. Thinking back to any time outside of the modern era brings to mind tons of work and just not a very pleasant life. Did someone get so fixated on anything, other than survival, that they had time to inspire Cervantes' Don Quixote? Or did Cervantes project a desire for the situation (and as a writer) to tell his story? I am going to need to do some major research on this. But from a biographical standpoint, I really want to know what inspired this book beyond its seemingly didactic analysis.