Cervantes' Motivation for Writing Don QuixoteMiguel de Cervantes' greatest literary work, Don Quixote, maintains an enduring, if somewhat stereotypical, image in popular culture : the story of the obsessed knight. and his clownish squire who embark on a quest for adventure motivated by faith. However, although this simple premise has survived since the novel's creation and spawned such universally known concepts or images as quixotic idealism and the frontal charge on a group of "giants" who are actually windmills, Cervantes' motivation for writing Don Quixote remains an untold story. . Looking at late 15th and early 16th century Spain from the perspective of a Renaissance man, Cervantes came to hate many aspects of the era in which he lived and decided to make the satire of what he saw as his faults; However, throughout the writing of what would become his most famous work, Cervantes was torn by a philosophical conflict that permeated the Renaissance and its intellectuals: the clash of faith and reason. When Cervantes began writing Don Quixote, the most direct target of his satirical intentions was the chivalric romance. He makes this aim clear in his own preface to the novel, stating that "...[his] sole aim in writing...is to invalidate the authority and ridicule the absurdity of those books of chivalry, which have, for so to speak, fascinated the eyes and the judgment of the world, and in particular of the vulgar. Immediately after the novel begins, he demonstrates some of the ridiculous and unbelievable writing of these books: as Alonso Quixano, the man who decides to become the knight Don Quixote, after going mad from reading too many these novels, sits in his office, tirelessly immersed in his belo...... middle of paper ......r (Magill 330, however, Don Quixote becomes less of a sadly comic character, and more heroic ( 331) after stoically confronting a lion, leading Sancho to change his master's previous title - "Knight of the Sad Face" - to "Knight of Lions". "an idealist who embarks on a seemingly impossible quest to rid society of injustice, "[has] assumed archetypal importance for what [he reveals] about the human mind and emotions (Person 81)", there is another story that remains hidden between the pages of the novel: what was Cervantes' original intention in writing, and how this simple goal - a humorous parody of chivalric romances - ultimately led to the literary incarnation of a formidable philosophical debate: should we allow the perception of truth to be dominated? by faith or by reason.