Arcangel as a knight errant/cowboy figure

During Friday’s class we discussed the idea of Arcangel acting as a knight errant during the course of the novel. When this idea was brought up, I remembered that Arcangel was described as ‘quixotic’ on page 47, which is a reference Miguel de Cervantes’ character Don Quijote and his quirky personality. Additionally, on page 48, Yamashita references Gabriel Garcia Marquez, an author whose works tend to deal with magical realism, a literary or artistic genre in which realistic narrative and naturalistic technique are combined with surreal elements of dream or fantasy. The reference to Don Quijote allow us to picture Arcangel as a man out of his time period trying to pursue a life of doing good deeds, very similar to Quijote. By adding Marquez as well, we are more apt to accept the idea because the theme of magical realism is already in place and we can take a character out of one time and put him in another. Arcangel’s main ‘deeds’ are when he physically moves two different buses, once on page 73 and once on page 197, both times doing so in the face of doubters and in dramatic fashion. “I will myself move this vehicle. What is it to you to see such a feat?”(73). Much like Cervantes’ knight, Arcangel gains the attention of those around him before performing his deeds so that others may know as well. An interesting comparison might also be a knight errant to a cowboy, because both live a kind of solitary life, whether it is out on a quest or on the range. Because we lack a clear Western cowboy character in this novel, labeling Arcangel as such might provide clarity when reading the novel.