The second part of Don Quixote contains 74 chapters. Its full Spanish title is The Ingenious Knight Don Quixote of La Mancha, and Cervantes published it in 1615, ten years after the first part.
Part Two is more self-conscious than Part One because its characters know that a book about their earlier adventures has already appeared. Don Quixote and Sancho are treated as famous figures, while Cervantes also responds to an unauthorized continuation published under the name Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda in 1614.
The 74-chapter structure carries the story through the pair’s third sally, their encounters with the Duke and Duchess, Sancho’s brief governorship of Barataria, and Don Quixote’s final defeat by the Knight of the White Moon. That defeat forces him to abandon knight-errantry and return home.
Readers sometimes confuse the 74 chapters of Part Two with the chapter count of the complete novel, which combines two separately published parts. The number 74 refers specifically to Cervantes’s authentic second part.