Compendio

Write down at least three reasons for Don Quixote’s enduring attractiveness. Why do we continue to hold him up as a hero when he’s clearly out of touch with reality?

It is obvious for most people that at first sight Don Quixote has nothing to do with the mainstream conception of a hero. He is at the opposite side of the spectrum and he is endowed with dementia that fully distorts his reality.However, he is a hopeful idealist willing to “fix” the world and, in contrast with normal heroes in the past literature, he has dreams, hopes and failures. This is why, when he looks back and realises that he has had a mediocre life without any excitement, starts immersing himself in all that fictitious chivalric world within his books, something which will turn him ‘mad’. This is the key factorwhich unleashes the chain reaction which is all the future story. He is a by all means an enterprising character, opposed to the passivity of many people nowadays.
Alonso Quijano decides to change his world and becomes what he felt he should have always become. This is far away from the accepted norm in his society and even sometimes nowadays, since we still feel restricted by many differentreasons. Don Quijote represents the idea of pursuing our dreams even though if they may seem odd in the first place. His journey is a true heroic deed and even though he did not change anything in his fictitious world, he changed the literary world forever.
In my opinion, Don Quijote will always be a hero, although his conception could not be further away from the traditional idea of hero. Herepresents the common citizen who became particular, the vulgar man who became noble. He gets away from the established norm, that condemns us to an empty life like the one of Alonso Quijano, in order to become a free human being.







What are the rhetorical features of Socrates’ defence? How might this be similar to a modern-day defence speech? What are the weaknesses of his defence? Whatwere the motives of those who voted against him?

Socrates was led to trial in Athens for two main reasons: misleading and corrupting the youth and not believing in the gods. The speech is brought to us by Plato, who wrote it after all these events. Although it is a defence, Socrates achieves to also create an accusation to those who were trying to shut him, by means of his eloquent andresourceful speech. It is a clear, fluent and natural speech, which helps the reader to catch up and never lose contact with it.
Socrates affirmed that he was the wisest of all men only because he knew that he knew nothing; this is a clear example of the Socratic irony and how his critical thinking works. Throughout The Apology he uses several different rhetorical features. One of the main ones issarcasm. It is present during the whole speech since the very first moment. Socrates criticises the hypocrisy of the prosecutors, the lost greatness of Athens and the Sophists in a great sarcastic tone, proposing questions that cannot be answered by the ones who are being addressed, since this would highlight their falseness and ill-will towards Socrates. Another important characteristic is his tone.This changes progressively in order to fit into Socrates purposes depending on who is he addressing or what he is trying to accomplish. His modest tone was an attempt to gain approval and piety from the non-corrupted people present in court when for example, he is recapitulating his whole life and method, describing it as incorruptible and true, and how still at the age of seventy this was thefirst time he was taken to court. He described himself as a humble citizen who never tried to wrong anybody on purpose, and who was always helping his co-citizens without asking anything in return, unlike the Sophists.
In my point of view this speech is not endowed with any strong weakness; on the contrary, even though Socrates was anyway condemned to death, it was a successful attempt since in...