Sancho Panza

Sancho Panza is the squire of Don Quixote in Cervantes' novel, published in two parts in 1605 and 1615. He is an illiterate farmer from Quixote's village, short, fat, fond of his food and his wineskin, and he agrees to leave his wife and children and follow a madman across Spain on the promise that he will be made governor of an island. The offer is absurd. He takes it.

The comedy of the pairing is that Sancho is not deluded. He can see that the giants are windmills, that the armies are flocks of sheep, that the golden helmet is a barber's basin, and he says so, repeatedly and at length. He rides a donkey named Dapple, whom he loves, and speaks almost entirely in proverbs, frequently three or four in a row with no regard for whether they contradict each other.

What happens when Sancho gets his island?

The best joke in the book turns on the reader. In the second part a duke and duchess, having read the first part, decide to amuse themselves by giving Sancho a fake governorship over a town they call Barataria, expecting a farce. He arrives, hears cases, and dispenses judgements of such shrewd practical fairness that the townspeople are impressed and the aristocrats are quietly humiliated. He then resigns, on the grounds that he was happier with a piece of bread and an onion and his liberty than with all this, and walks out with nothing.

Sancho is dominant Se, and he is the novel's anchor to the physical world. Where Quixote sees a category, Sancho sees an object: this is a windmill, this is a sheep, this is a basin, and I am hungry, and my back hurts. Cervantes uses him as a corrective throughout, and the reason the book is not simply a satire on romance is that Sancho's way of perceiving is presented as equally valid and considerably more useful.

The auxiliary Fi is why he stays. He is not stupid and the island was never plausible; he follows Quixote because he has become attached to him, and because there is something in the enterprise that he values without being able to name it. By the end he is arguing for the chivalric project more sincerely than his master, which is the novel's most moving reversal.

Why is Sancho a good governor?

Because tertiary Te turns out to be entirely adequate when it is applied to real cases rather than to theories. His judgements at Barataria are practical, evidence-based and delivered fast - the kind of common sense that formal training frequently obstructs - and the aristocrats had assumed that a peasant could not possess it. His inferior Ni is why he resigns: he cannot picture a future in the role, has no ambition to construct one, and correctly identifies that he was happier before. Given power, he examines it, finds it not to his taste, and hands it back, which almost nobody in literature does.

ISFP is sometimes suggested because of the loyalty and the simplicity. But Sancho is enormously talkative and gregarious - he narrates, argues, complains and proverbs continuously, and the novel is largely a conversation. The energy runs outward at all times.

ESFJ is occasionally proposed because of the warmth and the attachment to home and family. The difference is that his judgements are his own rather than the village's. He follows a man his community considers mad, defends him, and at Barataria decides cases on what he thinks is fair rather than on what is expected.