Cervantes' Motivations for Writing Don Quixote Miguel de Cervantes' greatest literary work, Don Quixote, maintains an enduring, if somewhat stereotyped, image in popular culture: the story of the haunted knight and his clownish squire who embark on a quest driven by faith and adventure. However, although this simple premise has survived since the beginning of the novel and has generated universally known concepts or images such as quixotic idealism and charging headlong into a group of "giants" who are actually windmills, the motivation of Cervantes to write 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 dislike many aspects of the era in which he lived and decided to satirize what he considered its flaws; however, during the writing of what would become his most famous work, Cervantes was torn by a philosophical conflict that pervaded the Renaissance and its intellectuals: the clash between faith and reason. When Cervantes began writing Don Quixote, the most direct target of his satirical intentions was chivalric romanticism. He makes this aim clear in his preface to the novel, stating that "...[his] sole object in writing... is to invalidate the authority and ridicule the absurdity of those books of chivalry, which have, as it were, he fascinated the eyes and the judgment of the world, and in particular of the vulgar." Immediately after the novel begins, it shows some of the ridiculous and unbelievable writing of these books: while Alonso Quixano, the man who decides to become the knight Don Quixote, after going mad from reading too many of these novels, sits in his study , tirelessly attentive to his beau...... middle of paper ......r (Magill 330), however, in the second part of the novel, Don Quixote becomes a less sadly comic figure, and a more heroic one (331) after stoically facing a lion, leading Sancho to change his master's previous title - "Knight of the Sad Face" - to "Knight of the Lions". seemingly impossible quest to free society from injustice, “[has] taken on an archetypal importance for what it [reveals] about the human mind and emotions (Persona 81),” there is another story that remains hidden between pages of the novel: what Cervantes' original intent in writing was, and how that simple goal - a humorous parody of chivalric romances - ultimately led to the literary embodiment of a huge philosophical debate: whether to let the perception of truth be mastered by faith or for reason.