Knight-errantry is a most chuckle-headed trade, and it is tedious hard work, too, but I begin to see that there IS money in it, after all, if you have luck.
And, moreover, when you come right down to the bedrock, knight-errantry is WORSE than pork; for whatever happens, the pork's left, and so somebody's benefited anyway; but when the market breaks, in a knight-errantry whirl, and every knight in the pool passes in his checks, what have you got for assets?
In short, then, he remained at home fifteen days very quietly without showing any signs of a desire to take up with his former delusions, and during this time he held lively discussions with his two gossips, the curate and the barber, on the point he maintained, that knights-errant were what the world stood most in need of, and that in him was to be accomplished the revival of
knight-errantry. The curate sometimes contradicted him, sometimes agreed with him, for if he had not observed this precaution he would have been unable to bring him to reason.
Further, if Don Quijote believes he inhabits the fictional world of
knight-errantry and Marcela the bucolic world of Arcadia, are they truly opposites?
Chesterton wrote of how the genre appeals to our sense of romance, saying that 'it is the agent of social justice who is the original and poetic figure,' with our modern police force 'a type of
knight-errantry.' The writer David Baldacci attributes the popularity of crime fiction to the need for balance and justice in a chaotic world: '[When] it looks like the bad is winning out over the good, along comes the genre of crime novels to put the balance back in life...
Specifically, as an alternative to practicing his profession of
knight-errantry, Nunez Rivera notes that Don Quijote is recurrently faced with pastoral figures who either provoke him to imitate them--Cardenio--or to defend them--Marcela.
The lexicon of Emma is medieval: gallantry, service, fair, lady,
knight-errantry, and, of course, Mr.
The books of
knight-errantry had set Don Quixote besides his senses, so he becomes the incarnation of idealism while his squire Sancho Panza fundamentally remains the embodiment of realism.
In the later period, more people of humble background, such as employed peasants, also took up
knight-errantry as a profession, resorting to it in a discordant time (Chen 1992, 3-11).
Deriving from and substantiating the code of
knight-errantry itself, Don Quixote's fourfold value-system is based on a specifically early modern mode of incommensurability: the impossibility of reducing one thing to another.
The modern genres thus adjust the medieval motifs of quest, chivalry and
knight-errantry, peeling them off the heroic layer, at least in the martial sense of the word.