The Princess Bride Analysis

The original novel The Princess Bride was written in 1973, and then rewritten several times after the appearance of the film adaptation of the same name with the then young Robin Wright, as a result, in the form in which the book exists today, this is not at all a funny fairy tale about great love and exciting adventures. , this is a real hymn to postmodernism, with its “author is dead” and the impossibility of creating genres of the past in the present. William Goldman is better known to the general public as a screenwriter, he has more than three dozen film plots on his account, and he wrote not only original scripts but also worked on adapting his own novels and books by his friend Stephen King. Both Misery and Dolores Claiborne and Hearts in Atlantis and Dreamcatcher were written by Goldman as a screenplay, so the two-time Oscar winner certainly knows a lot about stories.

The Story and Analysis

William Goldman is an amazing writer because he managed to write a novel about a novel. Allegedly, as a child, his father read Morgenstern’s novel ”The Princess Bride” to him at night, and then Goldman grew up and decided to re-release an abridged version of that very novel from childhood. S. Morgenstern, however, is a non-existent author, and the fairy tale in question was likely made-up by either Goldman or his father. The story of a beautiful love of a spectacular girl and a simple guy does not pull on an Oscar, but the feature of the novel is not in the story, but in the way, it is told. How funny the characters behave, what situations they get into, fiction on fiction, some moments cause a smile and even laughter (Reiner; Rizal and Purwanto 27). The original Princess Bride is a beautiful postmodern novel, written with sarcasm and humor, can only disappoint those who love serious literature and are unable to separate the joke from the truth. It should not be taken as a children’s fairy tale, or as a comedy: it is a modern fairy tale with humor. 

All the characters have unique attributes that are extremely exaggerated. Dandelion has beauty, Fezzik has strength, Inigo Montoya has swordsmanship, and Wesley has both intelligence and strength and swordsmanship. These characters go through many adventures, the book draws in its atmosphere and unobtrusiveness. The teenager wants the adventure to start as early as possible, be dynamic, and be able to capture him, tenaciously squeezing him in his arms (Reiner; Rizal and Purwanto 27-28). In general, The Princess Bride is a kind of a parody not only to fairy tales but also an exceedingly (and oftentimes unreasonably) adventurous spirit of the youth.

And it turns out that Sabbatini or Vern, with their slowness and thoroughness, evoke only boredom, you want to go through their texts with a vegetable cutter, cutting off the ”extra” couple of hundred pages and turning Captain Blood’s Odyssey into a real action game. In the early 2000s, retelling books were quite normal in the United States, which uses modern language and leaving only the plot backbone could retell Oliver Twist or Anna Karenina. Goldman plays with all this and, as it were, gives readers a chance to get a concentrate on a high-flown story about love and betrayal (Rizal and Purwanto 30). William Goldman places the accents in such a way that it turns out that it is the truncated Princess Bride that has value both for the modern reader as a whole and for the Goldman family in particular.

Conclusion

The author of the book is ironic about the genre of the novel, every phrase here is a joke perfect in its seriousness, the book is imbued with not just humor, a parody of everything one can imagine, including nearly all patterns and plot moves. The author even quite convincingly proves that he is not even an author at all, but just a scribe, mentioning some Morgenstern, who allegedly wrote the original story. There is no Morgenstern and never was (as well as the country of Florin, which fits perfectly on the map of Europe).

Works Cited

Reiner, Rob. The Princess Bride. Twentieth Century Studios, Inc., 1987.

Rizal, Muhammad, and Sugeng Purwanto. ”Focalization Analysis Applied in The Princess Bride Movie”. Dinamika Bahasa Dan Budaya, vol 16, no. 1, 2021, pp. 27-31., https://doi.org/10.35315/bb.v16i1.8378. Accessed 9 June 2022.