“I Know Who I Am”: Don Quixote, Self-Fashioning, and the Humanness of Ordinary Identity

“I know who I am” is a commonplace phrase about ordinary identity. It also is a poem of sorts, expressive of something far beyond its few words. When Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote states it, the identity he fashions is clearly imagined but also, somehow, real. In this paper, I will critique and clarify this seeming puzzle. Doing so will help me to consider the role of self-fashioning in Don Quixote, as well as the idea that our own self-fashioned identities might be best understood not as “real” but as bound to the possibilities of a poetry of “who we are.”