Authorship and Storytelling Theme Analysis

Through Goldman's asides to the reader throughout The Princess Bride, he aims to provide a sense of what the “original” book is like: overly complex, far too long, and in all ways unreadable to anyone but a Florinese scholar. Goldman sets out to remedy this by abridging the story and whittling it down to the “good parts,” or the parts that relay Morgenstern’s narrative and which Goldman insists are the book’s only entertaining elements. In doing so, Goldman suggests that while there's certainly an argument for reading 1000-page tomes of political satire and court history, abridged versions like his own are valuable because they transform antiquated or otherwise inaccessible stories into more easily digestible tales that people can read for pleasure. Goldman implicitly makes the case that fun and readable stories have the right to exist simply because they're entertaining; an author’s role, in this summation, is to provide for their readers. This, in turn, underscores the novel’s broader assertion of the power of storytelling to bring people together. Goldman thus also pokes fun at overly-academic and self-important types like Morgenstern and Count Rugen, whose work, Goldman insists, is interesting to no one but themselves.

In the introduction to The Princess Bride, Goldman explains that he wasn't interested in stories or the written word at all until he came down with pneumonia as a child. At this point, Goldman's father began to read him The Princess Bride and in doing so showed Goldman that stories could be genuinely entertaining, as well as could help people form relationships with each other; Goldman implies that he and his father weren't close before this experience, but that their relationship deepened after connecting over The Princess Bride. Later, he tries to create a similar experience of connection with his own son, Jason. However, after buying Jason a copy of The Princess Bride for his tenth birthday, Goldman discovers that his father had only read him “the good parts,” and the book as a whole isn't the children's adventure story he’d so loved. This prompts Goldman to embark upon his own formal abridgement process so that he has the opportunity to share his favorite story with his son, as well as with the rest of the world.

In discussing his choice to abridge Morgenstern's work into an entertaining 300-page novel suitable for children, Goldman notes that he can't expect that every reader of his abridgement will have the same life-changing experience that he had as a child. However, he does assert that there's still a lot to gain from the abridgement, as it will make it accessible to—and, ultimately, beloved by—thousands more people than would even think of picking up the original Morgenstern, given the length and specificity of the book. By telling the reader exactly what he's cutting out, from dozens of pages of court history to dozens more describing ladies' clothing, Goldman shows how esoteric and uninteresting Morgenstern's original work would be to a reader like him or like Jason, who just wants to be entertained with an adventure story. Morgenstern’s book has clearly lost sight of the preferences of the reader, and instead is presented as a rather selfish endeavor meant to suit only the author’s particular proclivities.

Indeed, by calling upon scholars like Professor Bongiorno, who insists that these passages are “deliciously satiric” and the best part of Morgenstern's original, Goldman makes it clear that people like Professor Bongiorno and Morgenstern are out of touch with the general populace—and further, he makes it very clear that because they're so out of touch, their work suffers as nobody reads it. By making these connections, Goldman constantly reaffirms his assertion that books exist to be consumed by others, and that sometimes, the only way to make this happen is through abridgement—which, in his opinion, entails cutting the self-important scholarly passages of a book and leaving only the “good parts.”

However, even in those “good parts,” Goldman goes to great lengths to point out that the story itself is ridiculous and, by extension, illustrates how so many clichés of romance and adventure stories are also ridiculous. He thus elevates the power of storytelling while also calling for better stories. For instance, by crafting Buttercup's character as one that's self-centered, not particularly intelligent, and valued only for her beauty, Goldman implicitly mocks the stereotypical princesses and damsels in distress that so often populate adventure tales. Westley's callousness and violence towards Buttercup serves a similar purpose of pointing out the misogyny and male bravado that so often takes center stage in such novels.

Goldman also uses the silly and outlandish nature of the story to satirize “publishing geniuses” and overly self-important writers like Morgenstern. For example, Count Rugen, Prince Humperdinck's evil and pain-obsessed sidekick, notes that he's written several scholarly articles on the subject and hopes to write a book on pain as well. Rugen's obsession takes him so far as to plan on killing Westley for his research, which can be read as a critique of authors who focus excessively on their own pedantic interests—and, in effect, who forget the human element of storytelling. Goldman underscores how snobbish and self-obsessed “scholars” like Rugen (and, he suggests, Morgenstern) are, and by extension, how this sense of superiority alienates them from the rest of humanity to the point where killing another human being for the sake of “research” is simply “annoying,” not a tragic loss of life. In this way, the entire novel upholds the immense value of the relationship between the author and reader, and suggests that the true purpose of literature is, above all else, to connect and entertain.