On The Fragmentary, Conceptual Nature of Borges' The Third Part of Don Quixote de la Mancha

A metafictional habit of Borges' short stories is that, rather than fully flesh out what could span the length of an entire book, he compresses the narrative by abstracting it up one layer. In this case, rather than providing you the complete third volume of Don Quixote in its entirety, he describes the book and tells us how it came to be. Borges tells stories about stories, and in doing so constantly reminds us both of the inadequacy of narrative to capture reality in its entirety, as well as the fabricated, fictional nature of the self.

The Third Part of Don Quixote de la Mancha acts as both a prequel and a sequel to the famed Spanish novel.

The story begins in a jail cell. Our narrator is a petty thief named Vulpini who shares a cell with the author of Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes. Vulpini passes the time telling Cervantes of a legendary knight named Don Quixote, who in Borges' story was an actual, flesh-and-blood chivalrous hero of that time. This Don Quixote had fathered a love child with one of his many mistresses in some far flung corner of Spain. The child, a boy, had never met his father. He had only ever heard of his father's exploits from the numerous secondhand tales that had sprung up around the man's legend. These chivalrous tales of romance and adventure made his father seem a bit more heroic than he had been in life, but the boy devoured as much material about his dad as he could find. He was hooked on the man's myth.

While Don Quixote the man was long dead, his son was ignorant of that fact and grew determined to find him. He decided to become a knight errant himself, in the hope to create a legend of his own that would impress his long-lost father, drawing him out of the shadows to welcome him again as his son. The boy, however, was driven mad by this fruitless quest. He perpetually made a fool of himself as he traveled across the lands in a funhouse mirror imitation of the legend of his father.

Cervantes is fascinated by this tale of his fellow prisoner and feels inspired to write a tale of his own about the poor boy. In Cervantes’ telling, however, he ingeniously renames the boy Don Quixote. Given that the boy imitates the father to a tee, Cervantes even inserts an inconspicuous love child into the text, almost as a way of nominating the next generation's Don Quixote, who will hear the legend of his father and also follow in his footsteps as a knight errant. The original Don Quixote of ‘reality’ is never seen, and all we are given is an endless series of imitators. Since we, as readers, are as much spectators to Don Quixote’s legend as they are, we are left in the uncomfortable position of wondering how much of ourselves is also a product of the imagination, whether our own or someone else’s. The result is that this story is fated to repeat in perpetuity, with each successive generation of Don Quixotes imitating the exploits of the last: an ouroboros of myth, storytelling as a self-contained reality, the self as a kind of imitation of …