Don Quixote
The first modern novel, published in 1605, and still the most influential work of fiction ever written. Cervantes invented the self-aware narrator, the unreliable protagonist, and fiction that comments on its own fictionality. Every novelist since has been working in his shadow. Bloom placed it at the center of Western literature, second only to Shakespeare.
Part One cycles rather than builds, another delusion, another beating, another roadside inn. The knight blocks sympathy for plenty of readers, "insanely annoying, dangerous to himself and others, and just plain nuts," and the comedy keeps detouring into what one reader calls "nauseating forays into the land of dick and fart jokes." Then the seams show. Sancho's donkey vanishes and returns unexplained, and "this guy can't even keep the supporting character's wife's name straight," one reader complains, while even admiring critics concede "Cervantes is often falling asleep at the wheel." The Captive's Tale and its fellow embedded novellas stall the main road for chapters. Across nine hundred pages the fatigue arrives a quarter of the way into Part One, and it is a long way from there.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
