To call Miguel de Cervantes a great writer might be a bit of a stretch. Some of the speeches he penned in Don Quixote are worthy of filibuster status, and he seems to be a little lax on certain details as well. Sancho Panza's burro, for example, gets stolen, then magically reappears for a while, then vanishes again, having been stolen the first time. Nevertheless, when considered at a distance, the first third of the two volume work seems to have a lot to say in both its original and current context.
Cervantes is openly critical of the medieval romances which were extremely popular throughout the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance. His hero is a lampoon of your typical Arthurian knight-errant, whose sole occupation was to ride in search of adventures and right wrongs. One of my favorite side comments in service of this satire is the fact that Don Quixote sets out sans money or food because he had never seen either mentioned in the stories he read. That's akin to saying you won't use the bathroom because you never saw Batman hit the head in the movie. Quixote aside, however, what makes this book a fine send up of the romances is that Cervantes attacks the stories using their own style.
Most medieval romances were rather long affairs which were broken up episodically. Sir Thomas Mallory's Le Morte d'Arthur, for example, is a compendium of stories without a strong narrative thread. They are connected in that all the stories are about knights related to King Arthur, but from one incident to the next, the reader is not guaranteed the same characters. You might begin reading about Lancelot in one chapter, but then not hear of him again for two-hundred pages. Cervantes uses this episodic structure, breaking the story up into chapters, but does something new by keeping the narrative largely focused on his titular character. Such devotion to a single knight and, perhaps more importantly, his personality, brings the book much closer to being a modern novel than the medieval romances it mocks.
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