The Examination and Burning of Don Quixote’s Books

The Examination and Burning of Don Quixote’s Books begins as a judgment on what reading can do and ends with the destruction of a library and the concealment of its disappearance. The curate and the barber try to protect Don Quixote from the books they hold responsible for his disorder, but their selective verdicts cannot prevent the loss of books they themselves regard as worth preserving. When Don Quixote wakes to find both the books and their room gone, the household’s practical intervention is absorbed into his imagined history of enchantments.

Examination and Judgment

The inspection is not a simple order to destroy every book. Faced with the remaining volumes, the curate distinguishes poetry from chivalric romance, arguing that books of entertainment do not necessarily cause the same harm. The niece objects that pastoral poetry might give her uncle a new vocation: he could turn shepherd, sing and pipe through the countryside, or become a poet. Her intervention broadens the household’s fear from one literary obsession to another. The curate accepts that these books could become a fresh temptation, yet still proposes examining and altering particular works rather than condemning them all alike.

His treatment of the Diana by Jorge de Montemayor makes that discrimination explicit. He would preserve its prose and its distinction as the first book of its kind, while removing the material about the sage Felicia and the magic water, along with most of its longer verse. The second part by the Salamancan, by contrast, is condemned; the Diana by Gil Polo is to be preserved. The verdicts present literary judgment as an active sorting process: a work may be divided, revised, saved, or sentenced according to the examiner’s opinion of its contents.

The curate’s judgment of Galatea is similarly qualified, and personally entangled. He identifies Miguel de Cervantes as a long-standing friend, but does not offer friendship as a reason to praise the book without reservation. He admires its invention while observing that it does not bring its story to a conclusion, and he leaves open the possibility that a promised second part might improve it. His immediate decision is preservation rather than burning: the barber is to keep the book in his own quarters. In the same inspection, the Araucana, the Austriada, and the Montserrate are praised as the finest Castilian heroic verse and saved as treasures of Spanish poetry. These particular decisions make the later destruction more than a clean execution of the curate’s literary judgments; valuable books are among the volumes that will be lost.

From Selective Censure to Destruction

The inspection’s distinctions prove vulnerable to haste and delegated action. Tired of looking through the remaining books, the curate decides that the rest should be burned without their contents having been certified. Even that hurried ruling does not account for what happens next: that night the housekeeper burns all the books in the yard and throughout the house. The narrator observes that some of them deserved preservation in lasting archives, but that the examiner’s laziness and their fate prevent it. The proverb that the innocent suffer for the guilty describes the consequence precisely: an effort directed against harmful reading sweeps away books that the inspection had reason to spare.

The burning follows Don Quixote’s return to sleep. After being struck in his imagined contest with Don Roland, he asks for food and leaves his revenge for later; the household gives him food, and he falls asleep again. While he is absent from the inspection and unable to defend or even discuss his library, the books disappear. The contrast is consequential: the family and the curate act on a diagnosis of his disorder, while Don Quixote’s own explanation for events will turn that household action into evidence of a magician’s hostility.

The Hidden Room and the Fabricated Explanation

The curate and the barber apply another remedy alongside the burning: they wall up and plaster the room where the books had been kept. Their plan is to prevent Don Quixote from finding it when he recovers, on the possibility that removing the supposed cause might also end its effect. They also decide that the household can say a magician carried away the room along with the books. The solution therefore does not merely remove the library; it stages its absence as a supernatural event, supplying a story designed to fit the very delusion the family hopes to quiet.

Two days later, Don Quixote gets up and goes straight to look for the room. He finds no door where he expects one. He searches from side to side, feels the place where the door used to be, and looks around without speaking before asking the housekeeper where the book room is. Her prepared answer is that neither the room nor the books remain and that the devil carried them away. The niece gives him a more elaborate account: a magician arrived at night on a cloud, riding a serpent; after entering, he vanished through the roof and left the house full of smoke. She adds that the supposed visitor announced a private grudge against the owner of the books and room, and gives his name as Sage Munaton.

Sage Friston and the Aftermath

Don Quixote rejects the name Munaton and identifies the enemy as Sage Friston. The correction shows how readily the concealed room becomes legible to him through the established framework of magical rivalry: the household’s invented account does not dislodge his belief but gives it a new occasion to operate. The housekeeper cannot confirm the exact name, saying only that it ended in “ton.” The mismatch between the niece’s confident, detailed story and the housekeeper’s uncertainty leaves the explanation visibly assembled, yet Don Quixote supplies the name that makes it fit his own account of events.

The episode thus has two linked outcomes. The household removes the books and blocks access to the room, but its deception preserves the logic of enchantment rather than correcting it. Meanwhile, the narrator’s account of the unexamined books and the worthy volumes lost in the fire complicates the proposed cure: the library’s destruction is not a precise remedy, but a blunt act whose excess is recorded even as the characters conceal it. The books are gone; their absence becomes another mystery for Don Quixote to interpret, and the supposed magician remains part of the world he believes he inhabits.