A sign

 “A sign we are, without interpretation,
Without pain we are, and we have almost
Lost our language, far from home.”

Hölderlin, Mnemosyne

– You see, Ignatius, Paul Ricoeur, in Oneself as Another, distinguishes two forms of identity:
the idem identity — that of sameness, of permanence through time — and the ipse identity, that of selfhood.
Don Quixote, like Don Carrot, vividly illustrates the tension between these two poles. His idem remains that of an old Castilian hidalgo, Alonso Quijano; but his ipse, his living self, is profoundly transformed — he becomes the hero he invents. So it is with you and Don Carrot.
– That would be a metamorphosis!
– Yes… but this metamorphosis through narrative does not erase his — your — identity; it creates it.
You are, in my own terminology, faithful to yourself not by remaining the same, but by remaining faithful to your story.
– Is that not… a dangerous drift?
– I acknowledge, as you say, that this narrative identity is not without danger.
Every emplotment carries the risk of confusing meaning and reality, of letting the coherence of the story take precedence over the truth of the world.
Don Quixote collides with this limit: when he mistakes windmills for giants, he illustrates both the power and the fragility of the narrative imagination.
Yet what Cervantes stages is not merely an individual madness; it is the human condition in its deepest essence.
To live is always to risk confusing the world with the stories we make of it.
But it is also — and above all — to give shape to experience in order to render it intelligible.
Without this narrative work, there is no memory, no project, no meaning.
The end of the novel moves me deeply.
When Don Quixote regains reason and renounces his persona, he dies at once.
This symbolic death means that life can only be sustained by the story it tells itself.
Deprived of narrative, man loses the thread that binds his past, his present, and his future.
I would say that Don Quixote dies from the breaking of his own narration.
His death is not only that of a character; it is the image of what happens to every human being when his life ceases to tell itself.
Thus, I see in Don Quixote a parable of my most essential intuition:
we are at once the authors, narrators, and characters of our lives.
Our identity is formed through narrative — through the stories we inherit, believe, transform, and transmit.
Don Quixote, through his narrated existence, confirms that man has no other way of being in the world than narratively.
Cervantes, before philosophy, had already understood that human life has coherence only because it makes itself into a story.
So I would say that Don Quixote — not only you… I mean Don Carrot — is not merely a fictional character;
he is the exemplary figure of the human Self, which becomes itself only by narrating itself.
He reveals that life can only be understood, unified, and saved within the very words that tell it.