An analytical comparison between Hegel’s and Girard’s readings of Miguel Cervantes Saavedra’s novel The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha is discussed in this essay. Both approaches are confronted in their understanding of mimetic relationships, and about the scopes and alternatives to death struggles between rivals. Hegel’s interpretation in chapter three of his Lectures on Aesthetics will be confronted with the chapter on The Master and the Slave in Girard´s Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure (an English version of his Mensonge Romantique et vérité romanesque).