Following the character-artist relationship, there remains the important and often unnoticed relation of the writer to his reader. Just as Cervantean characters seem to "write themselves," we have in this novel the aspect of the reader "writing himself" as well.
Because a reader is forced to think about each invented episode after it occurs, and because he suspects that Cervantes is not saying all there is to say about each incident, Don Quixote is sometimes difficult and frustrating for a modern reader to comprehend. He is obliged to wonder for himself why the hero does not lose his illusions sooner, why Sancho insists on remaining with his master to face more and more drubbings, why one feels a sympathy for the ridiculous knight who somehow remains dignified in the most humiliating circumstances. Like Sancho and Don Quixote, the reader is forced to reconsider the meaning of what has transpired each time the knight, bruised and weary, rises to remount Rosinante and continue his errant mission. We slowly come to conclude the final organic nature of this elusive book: to educate and mature the readers in the same way as Don Quixote and Sancho increase in self-awareness.
This is the extension of Cervantes' art of objectifying life's experiences. Standing aside from his "stepchildren," he allows them to impress each reader who encounters their careers in his own way. His novelistic realism, unlimited by supplying a given point of view of his creations, presents protagonists to the reader as one presents any human being to another, forcing the reader to understand, sympathize, or deny according to his own nature. Setting each character free in his invented world without guiding murmurs of approval or disapproval, Cervantes, the prime-mover novelist, also sets the reader free. This is another unique quality which makes Don Quixote one of the most lasting and elusive books in the world, and makes Cervantes one of the most consummate novelists that Western literature has produced.
