Don Quixote’s first sally is the beginning of his life as a self-appointed knight-errant: he rides from home to right wrongs, but repeatedly mistakes ordinary people and circumstances for the world of chivalric romance. Its comic reversals also expose a serious consequence of that confusion. His desire to defend the vulnerable is real, yet his interventions rest on assumptions he does not test, and the journey ends with him unable to rise from the ground and his neighbors bringing him home.

Departure and the romance imposed on the road

Having settled on a name for the farm girl Aldonza Lorenzo, whom he privately idealizes as Dulcinea del Toboso, Don Quixote decides not to delay the mission he imagines the world requires. Before dawn on a hot July morning, he puts on his armor, mounts Rocinante, takes his lance and shield, and slips out through the back gate without telling anyone. He anticipates wrongs to right, grievances to redress, and abuses to remove; in his mind, setting out is already the beginning of a public career.

The first obstacle is not an enemy but a rule from the books he has absorbed. On the open plain, he realizes that he has not been dubbed a knight and believes he therefore cannot properly fight another knight. He also thinks a novice should wear white armor, without a device on the shield until he has earned one. Rather than abandon his purpose, he resolves to have the first person he meets dub him and to scour his armor white at the first opportunity. He continues onward, leaving the choice of route to Rocinante because he believes chance is part of the adventure.

As he rides across Campo de Montiel, he imagines a future chronicler recording his deeds in the grand language of romance. He pictures his departure as a scene fit for lasting memorial and asks that Rocinante be remembered as his companion. He also frames the journey as a lover’s trial for Dulcinea del Toboso, speaking inwardly as though she had banished him. These imagined roles—the famed knight, the beloved’s devoted servant, and the hero already being written into history—accompany him before anything remarkable has happened.

The narration itself unsettles the apparent simplicity of this beginning. It reports that some writers place the first adventure at Puerto Lapice and others at the windmills, then claims that the account found in the annals of La Mancha puts Don Quixote on the road all day before he reaches an inn at nightfall. Rather than letting the first adventure settle into a single uncontested origin, the account foregrounds conflicting versions and the act of choosing among them. In the version followed here, the first decisive encounter begins with hunger and exhaustion, not with a challenge from an enemy.

The inn transformed by expectation

Looking for somewhere to recover, Don Quixote sees an inn and takes it for a castle, complete in his imagination with towers, a drawbridge, and a moat. Two young women standing at the entrance become noble ladies in his interpretation. He waits for a dwarf to announce his arrival by trumpet, but none appears; when Rocinante presses toward the stable, he rides to the entrance instead. A swineherd’s horn, sounded to gather pigs, supplies the ceremonial signal he had expected. The ordinary inn and its sounds are repeatedly translated into the vocabulary of his books.

The women turn away in alarm at the sight of an armed stranger, but Don Quixote reads their flight as fear of impropriety. He reassures them that his knightly order forbids him to offer anyone rudeness, especially highborn maidens. Their laughter at being addressed as ladies angers him, because he takes their amusement as a failure of the respect their supposed rank deserves. The encounter establishes a pattern that will recur throughout the sally: he treats his own interpretation as more authoritative than the other people’s visible reactions.

The Friday meal makes that pattern tangible. The inn has only pieces of salted fish, which Don Quixote accepts under a more flattering name, and he compares the small pieces to larger, finer fare. His armor obstructs him from feeding himself, so one of the women places the food in his mouth; the landlord uses a hollow reed to pour wine because the helmet’s ribbons are still tied. The meal is uncomfortable and makeshift, but Don Quixote bears it rather than remove the helmet. When a sowgelder later plays his reed pipe, he takes that sound as music for a guest at a famous castle. In his mind the fish has become trout, the dark bread has become white, the women are ladies, and the innkeeper is a castellan. Yet one part of the fantasy remains unresolved: he is still troubled that he has not been made a knight.

By the following dawn, he has been dubbed. The account records his changed status without detailing the ceremony here. He leaves in high spirits, but advice from the innkeeper has made him recognize that he needs money and shirts. He decides to return to his village for supplies and to recruit a neighbor, a poor laborer with a family, as his squire. The first return toward home therefore does not mark a rejection of the enterprise. It is a practical preparation for its continuation.

An attempted rescue and its failure

Before he reaches the village, Don Quixote hears cries from a thicket and immediately understands them as an opportunity to perform the duty he has undertaken. There he finds a youth of about fifteen, tied to an oak and stripped from the waist upward, while a farmer strikes him and scolds him. The youth pleads that he will take better care of the flock. Don Quixote calls the farmer a discourteous knight and demands that he mount and take up his lance, recasting a dispute between a master and servant as a challenge between armed opponents.

The farmer answers that the youth is his servant, says that sheep are lost through the youth’s carelessness, and claims that the accusation of withholding wages is false. Don Quixote’s intervention begins from a recognizable concern—that someone unable to defend himself is being struck—but he accepts neither an account he has not verified nor the possibility that the quarrel has circumstances beyond the scene before him. His imagined knightly procedure replaces inquiry: he calls for the farmer to face him as an equal rather than establishing what has happened or what the youth needs. The episode shows the gap between the protective purpose Don Quixote announces and the unreliable judgment through which he tries to carry it out.

Later, he meets traders and insists that they acknowledge Dulcinea del Toboso’s beauty, although they have never seen her. One trader asks for a portrait so that the company might judge the claim; Don Quixote instead takes the request as an insult and charges with his lance. Rocinante stumbles before reaching the speaker, and horse and rider fall. Pinned down by his armor and equipment, Don Quixote cannot get up, but continues to challenge the traders to stay rather than flee. A muleteer breaks the lance and uses its fragments to beat him. The traders continue on, leaving the injured knight alone on the road.

The contrast is sharp: the imagined trial of Dulcinea’s honor becomes a physical defeat, and Don Quixote assigns responsibility to his horse rather than reconsidering the assumptions that led him to charge. He regards the beating as a familiar knight-errant’s mishap, not as evidence that he mistook a group of travelers for antagonists. His confidence survives the collapse of his body and the failure of his attack.

The return home and the persistence of delusion

Unable to rise, Don Quixote reaches for another kind of support: a remembered romance. He recites the story of a wounded knight and imagines himself in that role. A peasant neighbor returning from the mill finds him, recognizes him after wiping the dust from his face, and asks what has happened. Don Quixote does not give a plain account. He continues the ballad, then shifts to another literary tale, fitting its language to his own condition. The neighbor understands that he is listening to nonsense and concludes that Don Quixote is mad.

The peasant removes Don Quixote’s breastplate and backpiece to look for wounds, finds no blood or mark, and struggles to lift him onto an ass. He gathers the weapons, including the broken lance, ties them to Rocinante, and leads both animals toward the village. Don Quixote cannot sit upright; he sighs, and when questioned again continues to answer through borrowed stories. His neighbor’s practical effort to get him home thus runs alongside Don Quixote’s continual effort to make his experience conform to romance.

When the pair reach the village at the beginning of night, the peasant waits until it is later before entering, so that the battered gentleman will not be seen in such a wretched state. At Don Quixote’s house, the curate and the village barber are already there with his housekeeper and niece. The household has noticed that he, his horse, and his weapons have been gone for three days. His housekeeper and niece identify his prolonged reading of books of chivalry as the cause of his change: they recall him staying awake for two days and nights over the books, then taking up his sword to slash at the walls and imagining he had killed giants. The curate agrees that the books should be judged and burned.

The peasant announces the returning figure by the names of heroes from the stories Don Quixote has been reciting. His friends and family hurry out and recognize him, still on the ass because he cannot dismount unaided. He insists that his injuries came through his horse’s fault and asks for the wise Urganda to treat him; the housekeeper rejects the need to summon a fictional healer and says they will care for him at home. His first sally closes not with recognition of error but with rescue by neighbors, family, and friends. The return establishes the pattern that will govern the adventures ahead: Don Quixote’s surroundings repeatedly restore the ordinary facts of his condition, while his mind continues to translate them into the language of knight-errantry.