Milan Kundera musing on Don Quixote:

Poor Alonzo Quijada meant to elevate himself into the legendary figure of a knight-errant. Instead, for all of literary history, Cervantes succeeded in doing just the opposite: he cast a legendary figure down: into the world of prose. ‘Prose’: the word signifies not only a nonversified language; it also signifies the concrete, everyday, corporeal nature of life. So to say that the novel is the art of prose is not to state the obvious; the word defines the deep sense of that art.

A magic curtain, woven of legends, hung before the world. Cervantes sent Don Quixote jounreying and tore through the curtain. The world opened before the knight errant in all the comical nakedness of its prose.

Once again I want to call up the figure of Alfonzo Quijada; see him mount his Rosinante and set off in search of great battles. He is prepared to sacrifice his life for a noble cause, but tragedy doesn’t want him. For, since its birth, the novel is suspicious of traegedy: of its cult of gandeur; of its threatrical origins; of its blindness to the prose of life. Poor Alonzo Quijada. In the vicinity of his mournful countenance, everything turns into comedy.

… novelistic thinking, as Broch and Musil brought it into the aesthetic of the modern novel, has nothing to do with the thinking of a scientist or a philosopher; I would even say it is purposely a-philosophic, even anti-philosophic, that is to say fiercy independent of any system of preconceived ideas; it does not judged; it does not proclaim truths; it questions, it marvels, it plumbs; its form is highly diverse: metaphoric, ironic, hypothetic, hyperbolic, aphoristic, droll, provocative, fanciful; and mainly it never leaves the magic circle of its characters’ lives; those lives feed and justify it.