Designed as a 'reading guide', this book provides a three-tiered approach to the literary fabric of Cervantes' masterpiece: story, narrators, characters, style and structure. Its three major divisions - "The Exemplary Story, The Quixotic Fiction, The Mythical Don Quixote," trace and analyze episode by episode the hero's transformation from a 'clinical' case of literary insanity and chivalric folly, through the artifice of interlocking fictions that sustain his rise to mock in Part I, to mythical status as redemptive hero of social satire in Part II.