· 1605 · Early modern
Don Quixote
An old man who reads so many books about chivalry that he goes out to live as a knight, against all evidence.
The founding case of a reader who mistakes a book for a world and then lives in it anyway. The whole book's plot is the argument that a person can be entirely sincere about a bond with something that is not there, and the reader is not asked to think less of him for it.
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