Viewed through his quixotism, however, the world casts images as from a rarified plateau whose very clarity is a distortion of the commonly accepted viewpoint. The knight, for instance, sees the goatherds primarily as fellow human beings. Though he would notice their ignorance and poverty if he were not mad, he addresses them as if they were his equals in refinement and erudition. The goatherds respond to his oration by paying elegant homage to his sincerity and directness: they bring forth, for his entertainment, a shepherd who sings verses and accompanies himself on a rebeck. A more appropriate and tactful response could not have been devised. Another example, one mentioned before, is that of the wily innkeeper who, despite himself, acts the part of a gracious castellan receiving a guest of quality. The duke and duchess, however, cannot reach the heights of nobility and the reader sees them as mere fools compared with the knight's high-minded sobriety. The quixotism he inspires in the followers of the ducal pair in Tosilos, disobeying his lord, in Donna Rodriguez's striving to make her betrayed daughter respectable, as well as in Samson Carrasco's perverted attempt to depose the quixotic madman himself is finally and definitively developed in his closest disciple, Sancho Panza.
Sancho's struggle between his love for his master, upon whom he depends so completely, and his own sense of reality (he constantly recalls the severe blanketing he felt on all his bones and sinews) continues throughout his squire's career. He believes nothing, for the Spanish peasant is skeptical of all but his own experience, yet, by virtue of his unlettered ignorance, is infinitely credulous. It is through this credulity that Sancho follows his master and eventually believes fully in him.
