How A Sentimental Education drew on Don Quixote
A documented line of influence: Gustave Flaubert demonstrably engaged Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
Don Quixote
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra · 1605
RenaissanceThe influenced
A Sentimental Education
Gustave Flaubert · 1869
The Age of the NovelRelevance
6/10
On A Sentimental Education’s page
- Frédéric Moreau is a 19th-century Quixote — a man undone by the romantic delusions he's read his way into
- Flaubert grew up on Don Quixote read aloud and called Cervantes the origin of his imagination; the "quixotic" figure runs straight into this novel
- Reading Cervantes first gives you the template Flaubert is darkening: the idealist whose convictions can't survive contact with the real world
On Don Quixote’s page
- Flaubert's earliest pleasure was Don Quixote read aloud to him as a child — he called it the origin of his whole imagination
- That Cervantine pattern resurfaces in Frédéric Moreau: a young man whose fiction-fed dreams of love and glory shatter against bourgeois reality
- The Quixote here is no longer comic but melancholy — Flaubert kept the deluded reader and stripped away the windmills