The growth and development of Sancho Panza - and of Cervantes

Some time back, when I was in the midst of Volume 1 of Miguel de Cervantes's "Don Quixote," I posted that Sancho Panza was not as dumb as he seems, that he's actually pretty sly and self-aware, that he certainly knows that DQ will never provide him with the governorship of his "insula" but that he sees DQ as at the least a patron who can provide him with a fairly large amount (by his peasant standards) of money - but as I progressed through Volume 1 I had my doubts and almost wrote a post retracting that view: in plenty of scenes and episodes in the latter half of Volume 1, SP really does seem to believe in the "insula" (he makes a big deal of DQ's not becoming an archbishop, which would lead to a less suitable post for SP, as if DQ was likely to become anything). Now in Volume 2 I see that my original instinct was right: in this Volume Cervantes is much more careful about portraying SP as very shrewd, aware exactly of DQ's delusions, and focused on what he can get from serving DQ - as well as on how, in his extremely kind and humane manner, he can help keep DQ from self-destruction. All this presupposes that SP is a person - and not a character: the real truth is that his character evolves both through organic development through the course of this great novel and through the growth and development of Cervantes as a novelist: the SP that he portrays in Volume 2 would have been impossible for him to conceive, imagine, or project as he was first sketching out this character in Volume 1, some ten years previous. Yes, literary characters evolve over the course of a novel - and so do novelists.