I could not have chosen two more disparate books on the topic. It is very clear that Nabokov greatly disliked the book while Johnson is very eager to praise and excuse the book.

Nabokov devotes an entire chapter (actually it is an entire lecture, the book is a compilation of his notes for a class he gave at Harvard) on the cruelty of the book. He argues that the book is not funny but we are made to laugh at his pain and humiliation. For me, however, the funny part of the scene is not the pain he incures when he charges the windmills and has his face bashed in but his insistence that the windmills are giants and Sancho's plain arguments that they are in fact windmilld. I have no idea what a seventeenth century Spaniard would have found funny so I don't know what parts of the scenes are intended to be funny, I can only say for myself it wasn't the physical pain Don Quixote endured that I found funny but perhaps I was laughing cruelly at the insanity of an old man. I agree with Nabokov that the second book was particularly awful, the Duke and Duchess are noxious and evil. I don't think Nabokov wouldn't have liked The Three Stooges very much.

Nabokov also argues that the side stories have no function in the novel but are in fact fillers. He believes that they were old stories Cervantes had lying around that he just added. Nabokov says that even the readers of his time felt this way which is why he responds the way he does in the opening of the second book and why there are no such stories in that half. Johnson, however, says that these 'interpolated stories' are a common feature of books in Cervantes day. If that is true then why was he criticized for them by his contemporaries? If there is some greater meaning to those stories they should have been clearer in his day. In fact Carroll Johnson alludes several times to the reasons for the side stories but never delivers.

The second book deals with the usurpation of his character. This is why I read critiques about the book, in such old writings there is only so much you can do on your own, there are historical details that a layperson (like myself) won't know. It was ten years in between the publishing of the first book and the second and in that time another book was written by some other guy. A lot of the characters we see in the second half are that other writers creations. This is also why Cervantes kills Don Quixote, to keep others from taking his errant knight on any other unsanctioned escapades.

Johnson brings a lot of knowledge to the subject which illuminates many of the scenes. One example is the scene where Don Quixote accosts some merchants on the road. In Cervantes' Spain only Jews were merchants, this would have been immediately apparent to the reader. Don Quixote levels his lance at them and tells them that they must declare Dulcinea del Toboso the fairest lady in the world they say they've never seen her so how can they say honestly that she is beautiful at all. Johnson claims this is a satire of the forced conversion of the Jews and Moors which was an event that happened many times in the hundred or so years before Cervantes birth. He offers a few more examples but none so clear as that one. I still felt that Nabokov was correct in saying that Don Quixote was ill-planned so I wonder how much these kinds of scenes could play out to a greater meaning.

It's been a month since a read these books so they are a bit foggy in my memory which teaches me a blogger rule, to be faster with my reviews and stresses the need to keep a reading journal. I am going to read them both again after my logic stage reading of Don Quixote which I will begin after I have finished Le Morte d'Arthur.