WHY THE DONKEY?
Sancho
Panza worked the land prior to working for Don Quixote and at that time his
daily wages came half from his salary and half from the donkey being used to
work the land so the donkey was really important to Sancho´s life. While
working for Don Quixote, his donkey was the poor version of Rocinante, Don
Quixote´s horse. Cervantes also talked about donkeys in
"El coloquio de los
perros", explaining us how a gipsy man placed a fake tail in his donkey to
sell it to a farmer and later, steal it and take the fake tail out to sell
it again to the same man as the other donkey´s brother with a lower cost.
(Pedro Gatell. 1793. “Historia del mas famoso escudero
Sancho Panza, desde la gloriosa muerte de D. Quijote de
In Don Quixote´s first edition, Cervantes doesn´t say much about Sancho´s donkey being robbed, it is only said that it happened, but in the second edition Cervantes explains it was Gines de Passamonte (Don Quixote calls him Ginessillo de Parapilla) who did it and he adds that it was not properly explained in the first edition by printing mistakes or because of a forgetful author. This is only one of the many points from the first edition being corrected in the second edition. In the first edition, Sancho´s donkey gets robbed in chapter 23 but Cervantes still mentions the donkey in chapter 25 as if it had never been stolen so there are many who firmly believe it was Cervantes´ fault not to explain how it got robbed and also to still mention it afterwards. Another current believes that donkey still shows after getting stolen because chapter 25 was written and originally placed in a different spot within the book but, because the chapter could have got rearranged, it created coherence issues. In the second edition there is a lot of corrections from the first edition, we know that it was Cervantes who added them because of the literary style, as the expressions Cervantes used were not common at the time, they were kind of signature expressions.
(Flores,
Robert M. 1982. “Sancho panza through three hundred seventy-five years of
continuations, imitations, and criticism, 1605-
The
donkey being stolen is also explained in the second part of Don Quixote,
that´s ten years after the second edition of Don Quixote´s first part, where
it had already been explained. That it thought to be because the chapter 3
from the second part, where the donkey being robbed gets explained again,
could possibly had been written in 1605 already, along with the writing of
the first part previous to its second edition and obviously previous to the
second part where it got placed. In this second part, it is said that the
donkey got robbed while Sancho was sleeping and that it was why the
character forgot to mention it in the first edition of the book.
The problem with the donkey gets also explained in the
third part of Don Quixote but this time it is widely thought of as Juan de