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.
Character Analysis
William Goldman
Content Warning: This section references alcoholism and sexual exploitation.
The William Goldman presented in the novel shares much in common with the Goldman who wrote The Princess Bride, although they are not quite the same person. The real Goldman uses several factual details to lend authenticity to the fictional Goldman, particularly in regard to his career trajectory. For example, both Goldmans wrote The Temple of Gold as their debut novel and rose to prominence for their work on the screenplay Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. However, much of the fictional Goldman’s personal life, including details about Goldman’s family and personality, are entirely fabricated.
While Goldman the author uses himself as a framing device and literary hoax, the Goldman on the page is a complex character with his own arc. In the introductory chapter, he is a jaded adult looking back on a formative childhood. This Goldman laments his intellectually stimulating yet loveless marriage and the (fictional) son whom he loves but doesn’t particularly like. At this point, he has lost all expectation that life will ever contain the “true love and high adventure” he alludes to in the full title and accepts his place in a corrupt and utilitarian world. This is displayed in the way he entertains the possibility of using the actress Sandy Sterling. When he ends up setting her aside in his quest for The Princess Bride, there is a pull between his life as a mid-level screenwriter and his life as a father—but also between who he has become and who he used to be.
During Goldman’s childhood with his Florinese father, Goldman is an entitled child who serves as an everyman archetype for little boys. He enjoys sports and is initially resistant to a classic fairy tale adventure. Through this book—which serves as a symbol for the wider world of storytelling itself—he evolves into a child who devours stories. At the same time, he undergoes a parallel change from a state of innocence to a state of new understanding as experience breaks his trust in the magic of Happy Endings. On a subconscious level, he’s still struggling with this broken trust even in his adult life. While he can never fully rebuild this trust, his abridged edition of The Princess Bride becomes an offering to both his son and the reader in hopes that they might hold onto the innocence he has lost.
Princess Buttercup
Princess Buttercup (who only becomes a princess when her lack of station presents an inconvenience) is the novel’s title character. Excluding the fictional Goldman, she is also the novel’s first point-of-view character. This arguably makes her the central protagonist, but she has little agency, with the men in her life shuffling her from one disastrous situation to another. However, one of Buttercup’s only acts of agency sets the plot into motion: She spontaneously declares her love for Westley. This passionate choice sends him on his journey to find his fortune, which leads to his life of piracy and apparent death, in turn leading to Buttercup’s engagement and the events following her kidnapping. Had Buttercup not been an emotional teenager, the lives of every other character would have been drastically different.
Despite an overall lack of narrative attention, Buttercup undergoes a subtle maturation over the course of the novel. The first time she meets Prince Humperdinck, she quickly allows him to coerce her into marriage. This causes immense anxiety and guilt as she recognizes that she betrayed not only Westley but also her own integrity. She makes amends for this betrayal later in the novel, ironically not by undoing this choice and choosing a different path, but by making the same choice a second time: Buttercup willingly returns with Prince Humperdinck in an attempt to spare Westley’s life. This too turns out to be a miscalculation. As the novel climbs toward its climax, Buttercup trusts in the forces of love to save her, but as the heroes make their escape, she receives one final moment of redemption: She scares away the guards by claiming both her queenhood and her adulthood. In trusting her own agency, she gives her and her new friends a path to a new life.
Westley
Westley is the true protagonist of the novel and fills several classic archetypes, including the hero archetypal character, the quest story archetype, and the rags-to-riches story archetype. He is fundamentally single-minded, a trait he shares with several other main characters in The Princess Bride. Westley’s love for Buttercup drives him from beginning to end, from his acceptance of her mistreatment on her farm, to his quest to find his fortune so that he can give her a better life, to his bartering for his love in the name of true love aboard the Dread Pirate Roberts’s ship. He returns to Florin to rescue her, pushing his body to its ultimate limits as he battles three criminals at the heights of their respective fields. The thematic implication in these scenes is that Westley is victorious because he’s fighting for true love rather than profit. This pattern of Westley’s love overcoming the limitations of his body continues after the rescue, as he withstands Count Rugen’s torture and even returns from death.
As an archetypal hero and romantic lead, Westley also carries some of the more negative masculine traits that have long been associated with this kind of character, particularly a sense of dominance and ownership over women. To the fictional Goldman listening to the story as a child, this kind of character would have harkened to the tradition of heroes like King Arthur and Robin Hood. There are even some parallels between this aspect of Westley’s character and the entitlement of the adult fictional Goldman.
Inigo Montoya
Inigo Montoya is one of the novel’s most enduring characters. Like the fictional Goldman’s, Inigo’s arc within the novel spans from his early childhood to adulthood. Another element these two characters share is the influence of their relationships with their fathers. Inigo’s childhood revolves around his love for his father, Domingo Montoya, and his father’s death shapes his entire adult life. Elements of this single-minded approach are hinted at early on; as Domingo works on the six-fingered sword, Inigo cares for him during his emotional rises and falls, taking on a parental role and ensuring that Domingo is sleeping, eating, and attending to his mental health. This experience shapes the responsibility he feels to avenge his father’s death. Like the fictional Goldman, Inigo experiences a formative break in which the darkness of the world, and his understanding of it, shatters his childhood innocence.
Inigo’s journey is one of searching for a guiding purpose after a period of debilitating trauma. Initially, this purpose is clear: revenge. To attain this, he first spends a decade honing his skills so that he doesn’t go into battle unprepared. However, he then encounters a surprising obstacle—he cannot locate his nemesis. This leaves Inigo unmoored and without direction, which leads him to begin drinking heavily. He’s in a vulnerable state when Vizzini finds him and offers him the direction and purpose he lacked. Instead of pursuing his father’s killer, he puts his efforts and energy into work as a mercenary.
Despite his new life of crime, Inigo does not have the heart of a killer. He expresses his concern to Vizzini when faced with the very real prospect of murdering Buttercup; however, walking away would mean giving up the only sense of purpose he has left, so he remains in Vizzini’s control. Ultimately, he loses this too when Vizzini dies. Once again, Inigo returns to drinking away his sense of ineptitude and loss. This character desperately needs something to work toward, a driving force to anchor him, and he returns to himself through Fezzik and the news that his ultimate battle is finally within reach. Once he faces this old enemy and emerges, he undergoes a rebirth that finally heals the hole left behind by his father and opens the future to new possibilities.
Fezzik
Fezzik is a supporting character who—in a parallel to Princess Buttercup—is viewed predominantly and often solely through the lens of his body. In his case, he is strong and imposing, which his allies use to further their own ends. This began at a young age when his parents pressured him into wrestling; it later formed the foundation of his relationship with Vezzini. The narrator describes him as looking older than his true age: “[E]ven though outside he looked twenty, and his mustache was already coming along nicely, inside he was still this nine-year-old who liked rhyming things” (118). This contrast between his mature appearance and internal experience highlights a core conflict for Fezzik: the expectations of others versus his perception of himself and his abilities.
In fact, most of Fezzik’s perceived lack of intelligence comes not from true intellectual limitation but from his own internal anxiety. He feels overwhelmed when forced to think for himself or step into a leadership role and most secure when he’s given direction. In times of stress, Fezzik uses rhyme as a coping mechanism: “Sometimes the rhymes made sense, sometimes they didn’t. Fezzik never cared much about sense; all that ever mattered was the sound” (114). These rhymes are something Fezzik is actually quite good at; when he and Inigo banter, Inigo tries to trip him up with challenging rhymes that Fezzik is always able to match. In these instances, Fezzik uses his intelligence in a way that feels safe and secure, without the pressure of a high-stakes situation or other people relying on him.
