Resumen de Death and Ritual in Don Quixote
In Alonso de Valdes's 1533 Diálogo de Mercurio y Carón, two very similar souls cross into the afterlife in Charon's boat. They have made near-identical preparations for death: they have confessed, made a will, and arranged for Christian burial. However, one man is bound for hell and the other for heaven. The man doomed to hell made expensive funeral arrangements, bought a fine tomb, and had his body dressed in a Franciscan habit. The other man observed these rituals with a certain amount of sloppiness, allowing his dependents to make the decisions (Valdės 30-31, 110-111). The difference between the two cases has to do with the material and emotional leave-taking that should conclude a life. The hell-bound soul was so anxious to express his piety that he neglected business concerns; Charon explains that he has been sentenced to hell for a material rather than a spiritual fault. The other man, presumably, kept his spiritual and material life in proper balance through the control of emotion. Rather than fearing death, he accepted it rationally, and his faith, moderation, and confidence in the afterlife assured him what the Spanish Golden Age deemed a "good" death.
Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote reflects a similar understanding of the good death, and death preparations occupy considerable space in the first and second parts of the novel. Cervantes reveals a deep familiarity with the ars moriendi tradition as practiced by Spanish humanists and with the conventions of early modern wills, which declared the piety of the testator through spiritual and material provisions. However, the treatises and wills do not always agree in their ideology, a tension Cervantes reflects in his literary treatment of death and dying. Cervantes's narrator at times seems close to humanist writers on death, but he also employs ironic distance in depicting death rituals. In this essay, I explore how both the ars moriendi tradition and the conventions for making wills and inventories of goods in early modern Spain impacted Don Quixote's death, ultimately rendering it ambivalent rather than "good."
