Don Quixote resists answers. In it, according to Tom Lathrop, "when something--anything--is stated, sooner or later it will be contradicted" (10). Lathrop's is an amplified articulation of the dialectic nature of Don Quixote: life vs. art, reality vs. imagination, body vs. soul, words vs. deeds, even humor vs. cruelty. In opposition to the tradition and its perceived stability and unquestionability, the mutually probing dialogue between the two protagonists and the shifting narrative voice that leads James Parr to characterize the text as "slippery" avoid making or affirming pronouncements with any finality (15), effectively countering what Arthur Efron calls Dulcineism, "the belief that human life is satisfactorily conducted only if it is lived out in close accord with prescribed ideals of the received culture" (11). Thus Lathrop's "contradicted" can be more accurately articulated as "questioned," since the interactions between the opposites are really mutually interrogative, preventing them from being resolved. After all, when Sancho Panza addresses one of the basic premises of the novel--Don Quixote's madness--asking, "Is it possible that a man who knows how to say all the many good things that he's said here can say he's seen the impossible foolishness that he says he saw in the Cave of Montesinos?" his putative answer, "Well now, time will tell," only delays the actual one (619). (1) Harold Bloom points out that "critics have failed to agree on most of the book's fundamental aspects," comparing it to Hamlet in subsequent generations' inability to answer the questions that the texts raise ("Cervantes" 146). (2) But unlike Hamlet, whose questioning is often one-sided, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza engage in dialogic interrogation. Cast in the genre of romance, which D. H. Green sees "as a questioning mode which is particularly open to irony as a questioning mode of speech" (390), the two protagonists highlight the ironic nature of questions as well as the questioning nature of irony.

PLAYING TO TYPE?

Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are not infrequently referred to as alazon and eiron. Don Quixote is the alazon, the one who pretends to be more than he is and who is, according to D. C. Muecke, the victim of irony since he is not aware of a truth that other character(s), author, and/or the audience share (Compass 19 and passim). Sancho is the eiron, the mischievous challenger and consequently the inciter and thus the source of irony. (3) Northrop Frye says that an ironic comedy is primarily "speculum consuetudinis," where the eiron assumes a "pragmatic attitude" toward the conventions (Northrop 155, 156). (4) "Pragmatic" here means primarily "independent": while alazon follows the custom and expectations to the letter and then some, eiron is an independent thinker, someone with the pragmatic approach of questioning the prescribed and figuring out, offering, and/or forging an alternative narrative. A comedic alazon like Don Quixote "has conditioned himself to act a single part, and so falls into the bondage of his own law"; the counterpoint to his part is the eironic questioning, which delivers us from...