The publication of Avellaneda’s Don Quixote sequel interrupted Cervantes’s leisurely progress on the Second Part and changed the shape of the work he was writing. The continuation itself was not the deepest offense: its accompanying preface attacked Cervantes personally, and the threat of further imitators helped drive him to finish the novel and give Don Quixote a definitive ending. The episode thus became both a literary quarrel and an accidental force in the completion of the book.

The volume reaches Cervantes

Cervantes had reached Chapter LIX of the Second Part by approximately October or November 1614, working at a pace that left room for other projects. At that point, a small octavo printed in Tarragona came into his hands. It presented itself as a second volume of The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha, attributed to the Licentiate Alonso Fernandez de Avellaneda of Tordesillas. The discovery was not simply news of another writer taking up his subject: it confronted Cervantes, in the midst of his own continuation, with a rival version already in circulation.

The timing sharpened the interruption. Cervantes had not made rapid progress toward a second volume, and the closing words of the first had left the possibility of continuation unusually open. He had used vague language about what might follow; its final words even seemed to invite another writer to take up the tale. Eight and a half years passed without a clear move from him to continue it, by which time Avellaneda’s book had probably been written. The account therefore distinguishes two grievances: the mere continuation gave Cervantes little reasonable cause for complaint, while the attack attached to it supplied the personal sting.

The preface and the disputed authorship

Avellaneda’s preface charged Cervantes with age, loss of a hand, imprisonment, poverty, and lack of friends. It also accused him of envy toward Lope de Vega’s success, and portrayed him as petulant and querulous. The force of the offense lay, in this account, not in the existence of a sequel but in the coarse personal abuse used to introduce it.

The attack was also connected to Cervantes’s criticism of the drama. Avellaneda accused him of attacking both the author and Lope in that criticism; the account identifies Avellaneda as belonging to the circle of dramatists associated with Lope, while stressing that his identity remained unresolved despite extensive critical investigation. Navarrete and Ticknor believed Cervantes knew who he was. The narrator of the biographical account instead reads Cervantes’s anger as suggesting an assailant whose identity was hidden from him. Cervantes inferred from linguistic solecisms that Avellaneda was Aragonese; Pellicer supported that view and further conjectured that he was an ecclesiastic, probably a Dominican. These remain proposed identifications, not an established solution.

A provocation that changes the ending

From the moment the rival volume reached him, Cervantes seems to have feared that more continuations might follow. He put aside his other work and concentrated on completing the Second Part. His chosen defense was to finish Don Quixote’s story by killing its protagonist, closing off the adventures that another writer might otherwise continue. The publication therefore affected not only the pace of composition but its finality: an open-ended literary possibility became a reason to make the ending unmistakable.

The account does not present that ending as artistically effortless. It calls the conclusion hasty and, in places, clumsy, and finds the repeated scolding of Avellaneda increasingly tiresome. Yet those reservations sit beside an important consequence: Cervantes completed the work. The rival book’s influence was not limited to provoking rebuttal within the Second Part; it helped determine that the narrative would end rather than promise another installment.

The unwritten continuation

The episode also changed what readers received by preventing, or at least displacing, a different projected continuation. Without Avellaneda’s volume, Cervantes might have ended the Second Part he had in hand by promising a Third Part in which Don Quixote and Sancho Panza became shepherds. Cervantes had apparently considered turning from the books of chivalry to the pastoral romances, treating that literary fashion in a comparable way. This was a possibility, not a completed plan, but it gives the rival sequel a consequence beyond the pressure it placed on the ending.

The biographical account judges it more likely that Cervantes’s many plans and projects would have left the volume unfinished until his death. In that counterfactual, readers might never have encountered The Duke and The Duchess or followed Sancho to Barataria. The sequel’s unwanted arrival thus helped secure not just a conclusion but the completion of episodes central to the Second Part as it survives. Its author could be judged a poor imitator, yet the account insists on an irony: without the provocation, Cervantes’s own work might have reached readers as an incomplete torso.

Literary consequence and critical tension

The publication’s place in the novel’s history rests on a double reversal. Avellaneda’s continuation challenged Cervantes’s possession of a story whose first ending had left room for another hand; Cervantes answered by making his own continuation definitive. At the same time, the rival writer’s personal abuse created the urgency that Cervantes’s earlier invitation and long delay had not. The sequel was thus both an infringement that provoked resentment and an external pressure that helped bring the larger work to completion.

That consequence does not erase the account’s criticism of Cervantes’s response. The haste, occasional clumsiness, and recurrence of attacks on Avellaneda remain part of its description of the ending. But the episode’s literary importance lies precisely in the tension between those costs and the result: a quarrel that may have narrowed Cervantes’s projected future for his characters also helped preserve the Second Part’s completed form, including its final closure of Don Quixote’s career.