I’ve now read the introductions to the 30th and 25th editions, looked at the map on the front inside cover, and read the first chapter. I’ve realized a few things and found a few things to be more confusing than I originally thought.
Goldman, the person who abridged the text (and wrote the movie script) seemed to feel that The Princess Bride was boring in its whole form, as he told us in his introduction to the twenty-fifth edition. So, he cut it down and kept only the parts with action, getting rid of the political parts that were no longer relevant, as he explained in the prologue. I recognized the book as iconic in my impressions and I have already seen that come to light in the introduction to the 30th edition. William Goldman tells of when he went to see the six-fingered glove and there were many people there to see the artifacts because they were iconic. However, he also tells of how the Princess Bride didn’t take off in America until the movie came out. Morgenstern, the book’s true author, said that he almost wrote an ending where Inigo dies. In this case, he would have gotten rid of the famous line where Inigo introduces himself and then tells his enemy to prepare for their final moments. Then, he realized that he was just pushing his own feelings of missing his own father onto the story and was going to change the history, the real history behind the book, in order to make this possible. From this, I find that Morgenstern really wanted this book to be a fairy tale and so he has this tone of longing and hope throughout the story that really makes it the Princess Bride that we know today. Even in the first chapter, Buttercup’s longing transfers over, along with her hope that Westley will meet her again, only to lose hope when he dies. The text is set in third person, but before going back and looking at the texts I thought it was in first person, the way the somewhat omniscient narrator tells us of Buttercup’s feelings so personally. I thought this was a good way to set up the text to know what Buttercup is thinking without having to skimp on what the other characters are doing. Buttercup is a somewhat well-off young lady whose parents own a farm. She holds no interest in love until she realizes her true passion for the farm boy, Westley. The count and countess come to see what is going on at their farm with the guise that they need to learn how to care for cows, but this is not true. The prince is also mentioned but he hasn’t come into the story yet, being in a far off castle. Buttercup lives on a farm that is a ways off from the village. As drawn on the map on the front cover, we see that the farm is drawn with a large barn behind it and the hovel off to the side, with a fence around the house and a large plot of land surrounding all of this. Westley leaves for America on a ship after Buttercup professes her love, and he promises to send for Buttercup when he can. Buttercup is told that his ship was attacked by vicious pirates and that he could not have lived. Buttercup vowed she would never love again after she lost hope for her love. A part of the text I found interesting was how Morgenstern used parentheses to make subjective arguments, such as the most beautiful woman. He tells that the time period this was set in was after taste, or before glamour, which are also subjective and otherwise not-exactly-true statements. However, Morgenstern uses them to enforce the tale part of the fairy tale, in other words he uses them to metaphorically push the idea onto us that these aren’t taking place in any particular time period, that in essence, they are fiction, and could really happen at any time, under the right circumstances. I’m quite interested to see how soon Buttercup will meet up with Westley again and when their adventure will begin.
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The Princess Bride. It's an iconic classic as a book and as a movie. In the coming weeks, I will be posting about this book and my thoughts on it. I'm excited to meet the characters in book form and relive the fairy tales of childhood in a new light.
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AuthorMy name is Katie. I love to read, write, and explore. I have a cat, dog, and one fish and am proud of my left-handedness. I love adventure and am always open to new things. Archives |