44 pages • 1 hour read
William GoldmanThe Princess Bride
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 1973A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
IntroductionChapter Summaries & Analyses
Introduction Summary
Content Warning: This section references suicidal ideation, alcoholism, sexual exploitation, and domestic violence.
William Goldman looks back on his childhood and his introduction to his favorite novel, The Princess Bride. In school, he looks up to his teacher Miss Roginski; she despairs of him living up to his potential. He recently failed a reading test and thinks only about sports. While Billy struggles in school, Miss Roginski sees his powerful imagination and calls him a “late bloomer.” Years later, when Goldman publishes his first novel, he sends Miss Roginski a copy. He receives a note back from her that references “S. Morgenstern,” the author of The Princess Bride.
Goldman remembers an autumn when he was 10 years old, looking for the football game on the radio. When he can’t find it, he wails to his mother, who reminds him that the game isn’t on until the next day. When this happens two more times, Billy’s parents realize he’s ill with pneumonia. He spends 10 days in the hospital and then is on bed rest for several weeks, during which time his father begins reading him The Princess Bride.
Goldman’s father is from Florin, the same (fictional) country in which the novel is set, and immigrated to America as a teenager. He still struggles with English and tells Billy that he once saw Morgenstern in a café. Billy becomes, to his utter astonishment, deeply invested in the story. His father reads to him each night while he recuperates. Once Billy is back at school, he begins seeking out more adventure stories. As an adult, he looks back on the impact this book had on his life and career. He grew up to marry a child psychologist named Helen, and they had a “fat” son named Jason. When Jason turns 10, Goldman is across the country preparing for his upcoming film, The Stepford Wives. Goldman wants to get Jason a copy of The Princess Bride, hoping it will impact him as it did young Goldman. He asks Helen to find a copy. At his hotel, Goldman is approached by an actress named Sandy Sterling, who flirts with him to try and get a role in his film. He contemplates exploiting her in this way, which he knows is common practice in the business, but they’re interrupted by Helen calling to say the book isn’t available. Goldman reaches out to other bookshops, becoming increasingly obsessive about tracking down a copy of the rare novel. Sandy becomes impatient and leaves. Finally, Goldman finds a shop that sells him the English and original Florinese copies of The Princess Bride.
When Goldman returns home, he asks about the book and realizes Jason never read past the first chapter. He starts to read the book himself and realizes that it’s very different than he remembered; there is a lot of political filler that his own father skipped over while he was reading it to him. He calls his publisher and arranges to release an abridged version of the novel containing only the pertinent adventure parts. He postpones The Stepford Wives so that he can focus solely on his abridgement. As he reflects on his motivations for taking on the project, Goldman laments the loss of his belief in adventure and true love.
Introduction Analysis
This untitled introductory chapter introduces the novel’s framing device and external narrative. The real Goldman creates a fictitious version of himself and his life, using a blend of made-up and authentic details. For example, he talks about his debut novel, The Temple of Gold, a real book published in 1957. However, he later says that the book was inspired by the setting of Morgenstern’s The Princess Bride, which is of course not true because The Princess Bride didn’t exist in 1957. A particularly well-known real-life detail is The Stepford Wives, a 1975 screenplay that Goldman wrote. Because these autobiographical details are easy to verify and because readers of the novel’s first edition would have recognized them, they enhance the hoax.
The personal details are more challenging to verify as fact or fiction and are where much of the deviation between life and story occurs, but they also give the fictional Goldman depth and nuance as a character. For instance, Goldman’s wife and son are fictional, as is his Florinese father. Many of these details, particularly Goldman’s relationship with his family, set him up as a jaded character who has lost touch with his childhood innocence and the hope that The Princess Bride once instilled in him. His desperation to find a copy of the novel for his son reflects a sense of mourning for the boy he himself once was. Over the course of his novelistic life, Goldman experiences a tragic rise and fall: The novel opens his eyes to new possibilities and then takes them away by forcing him to face hard truths about the world. The fictional Goldman eventually finds redemption by offering these possibilities to the wider world through his abridgement, establishing the novel’s interest in Happy Endings.
The introductory chapter also incorporates elements that will recur throughout the main narrative, such as “true love,” “high adventure,” and other motifs that describe the story’s overall arc. This section likewise establishes Goldman’s narrative voice, which occurs throughout the novel in his interjections and abridgement notes. The author uses sharp, urban language to distinguish this voice from the rest of the “Morgenstern” novel, creating a contrast between the two writers and their approaches to the story. Thematically, the introduction also draws contrasts between the lack of true love and adventure in Goldman’s life (highlighted by his lack of affection toward his family, as well as his interaction with Sandy Sterling) and the high-stakes, emotion-driven narrative of The Princess Bride.
