The two books of Don Quixote forward the exploits of a once modest man who becomes late in life possessed completely by a mania for deeds of chivalry brought on by his singular collection of books on knight errantry. His books so inspire him that Quixote enlists a squire, his good friend Sancho, with promises of all the rewards proper the likes of kings and emperors to be at his feet by the journey's end.
The story proceeds largely through a series of misadventures, each followed by their respective discourses between the knight and his squire, whereby the comrades remark upon their gross mistakes while their wounds are still aching. That Quixote and Sancho are so rarely apart from eachother, there is a large proportion of dialogue to third party narration. Their discussion offers great interest, and creats an agreeable sense of the monotony between their adventures, offering an agreeable suggestion of the arid stretches of the spanish country side, and of the hardship of adventure.
This pattern of first having adventures and then remarking upon them is handled as a striking literary technique, and the two books of Don Quixote carry this precedent within their pages as an example of how two close characters may relieve the ungainly task of third party narration through lively dialogue.
And yet, despite all the morals that Don Quixote and Sancho confer upon each other, they do not learn their own lessons well, and their journies are riddled with uncured and increasing manias and all types of physical duress endured for naught. And after reading the books, I am sure that the greater moral of Cervantes proper to the entire work of Don Quixote was that people are greatly bound to folly, and often subject to fate.