He employs a range of terms; in addition to 'Cervantes,' 'Don Quixote,' 'Sancho Panza,' 'Dulcinea,' and 'Rozinante [sic],' I have found 'quixotic,' 'quixotism,' and even 'quixotry.' In keeping with this variety, his interpretation varies as well.
(8) David Quixano represents this forward-looking quixotism, which sees America not as a repetition of European civilization, but as its overcoming and perfecting.
(12) Though Herzog contains the fullest explicit engagement in Bellow's writings with the broad implications of quixotism for inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere, this aspect of Bellow's sixth novel has received little scholarly attention.
At this point Herzog reflects on his own quixotism in the following terms:
Whether or not Bellow was aware of Miguel de Unamuno's existentialist reading of "Yo se quien soy," in Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho (134-36), he marvelously adapted the temporal duplicity inherent in quixotism to interpret the trans-Atlantic in-between of being at one and the same time no longer European and not yet simply American.' (14)
Ignatius's quixotism is underscored by his having a single book on which he relies even more devotedly than Don Quixote does on Amadis of Gaul: Boethius's The Consolation of Philosophy.
What makes this so uproariously funny in A Confederacy of Dunces is Ignatius's quixotism; that is, his arrogant desire to impose, on the kaleidoscopic variety of American identity, a closed, homogenous worldview, deriving from Western Europe prior to Columbus's first voyage.
