Don Quixote is, above all, a parody of books of chivalry, the genre the prologue says it wants to topple, and especially of Amadis of Gaul, the hero's favorite book. The parody goes beyond the genre: it makes comedy of the idea of living what one has read.
The prologue to Part One asks the reader to keep his aim fixed on toppling the ill-founded machine of these books, tiresome to so many and praised by so many more. They were prose narratives of knights who roam exotic lands slaying giants and rescuing damsels, a reading success in the first seventy years of the sixteenth century, and they were criticized by moralists who accused them of drawing readers away from religion. In Cervantes's time they had already been surpassed by the literature of the Golden Age, and no one saw them as a threat.
Auerbach reads the gentleman's first sortie as the perfect parody of the departure of Calogrenant, the knight of King Arthur's court: the courtly knight sets out on a trial that the world has deliberately prepared for him, and Don Quixote finds not a prepared world but an ordinary one, with inns, merchants, and windmills. Carpeaux reminds us that a book which was the hero's favorite reading cannot wholly die.
The parody is not mere contempt. Within the story, the priest and the barber spare Amadis in the examination of the library and condemn nearly all the rest to the bonfire, and the canon of Toledo criticizes the genre for lacking form and verisimilitude, yet confesses that he felt the temptation to write a book of chivalry. The book's laughter coexists with the admiration of those who know the models.