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Guillermo Fernández Rodríguez-Escalona
The episode of the Ínsula Barataria represents a passage of Don Quixote in which the key concepts of Cervantes’s political thought are better demonstrated than in any other passage of the work. This episode takes shape in two interrelated parts. The first contains Don Quixote’s advice to Sancho, which constitutes a narrative representation of Cervantes’s political thought. The second, which features Sancho Panza’s actions once he assumes the role of Governor of Barataria, suggests that all political action must be subordinated to morals. And both of these are contained within a framework of mockery that, far from ridiculing the protagonists, shows the moral degeneration of the Duke’s servants. The political, moral, and parodical interpretations of this passage become meaningful within a more general frame, that of the modern conception of the world. In this conception, politics is embedded within both morals and moral behavior.
Cervantes’s parodical elements (such as the chivalresque and the carnivalesque) symbolize a way of representing a case study, the meaning of which reveals the limits of obsolete intellectual models in order to highlight Sancho Panza`s profound governing sense: the crisis of values in the transition from the Renaissance to the Baroque
