Why Don Quixote is actually sane

Readers and scholars for centuries have enjoyed unraveling the labyrinthine layers of narrative the Cervantes embeds in "Don Quixote," one of the first and most intricate examples of metafiction, stories within stories, the frame story of the author himself, the DQ adventures, the reality and the illusion that DQ perceives, the narratives of the people whom DQ and Sancho Panza meet on their travels, the interpolated poems, the many references and allusions to other works of literature, the biographical elements as Cervantes tells by indirection his own life story and his years in captivity, the realistic (somewhat) portrayal of life on the byways of rural Spain in the early 17th century, and of course the parodies and appropriations of various literary forms and styles - and let me add one other element: during the long interlude in Volume 1 when DQ and Sancho stay at the country inn - much of the humor hinges on DQ's insistence that the inn is actually a castle, which he must defend, and that all of the artifacts are various objects of knight errantry and chivalry - and moreover that anytime he or anyone else perceives otherwise it's because and enchantment has been put upon all of them. It's all very funny and ridiculous - and yet - within the terms of the novel, is Don Quixote actually correct? Isn't the inn, for all its realistic details of rustic even primitive comfort, more like a castle than an inn - or at least more fictive than real? Every time one of the characters embarks on a narrative, it turns out that one of the interlocutors is the long-lost brother or the unfaithful lover or some such outlandish coincidence - as if there were only 20 or so families in all of Spain, as if someone can come back from 20 years of captivity and the first person he will stumble upon is his long-lost brother? You'd have to be crazy to believe that. The inn actually is enchanted, and might as well be a castle. Don Quixote is the only one who sees his environment in Cervantes's terms. He's the only one who's actually sane.