How volume 2 differs from volume 1 of Don Quixote

As Miguel de Cervantes begins Volume 2 of "Don Quixote" you wonder - is there anything more to say, aren't the second volumes (exception: Godfather 2) usually just pale reprisals of the first volume, an attempt to cash in on the success of the first volume - but Cervantes takes the issue head on, makes it clear he's writing this in part because someone else had come through with a fake continue adventures of DQ - he's claiming what's rightfully his. Volume 2 begins with some of the metafiction that has endeared DQ to so many scholars (and readers) as a visitor explains to DQ and Sancho Panza that their exploits are now famous around the world because of the chronicle of their lives - and DQ and SP and others engage in a critical discussion of the novel in which they appear, which in fact invented them - the novel turning in upon itself, like an origami figure folding up - you can see why Borges was drawn to the labyrinthine devices of this novel. It's also obvious in Volume 2 that Cervantes is ever more aware of what made Volume 1 such a success - it's more about the characters and their interaction, and less about the action: in volume 1 there was a lot of slapstick and farce in the first chapters and it took Cervantes a while to establish DQ and SP as characters, but in Volume 2 he really lets them unwind and expound - including long discussions between the two, and between Sancho and his wife - there's a danger in pushing their eccentricities and traits too far to the extreme, but Cervantes pulls away from that brink and just makes them delightfully nutty and bound to each other - a relationship he will develop as the peripatetic novel takes its course.