In The Princess Bride Goldman managed to produce a fantasy novel that parodies the genre in a consistently amusing manner, yet also reveals an underlying seriousness of purpose. It is a fine balancing act, successfully accomplished, which is why The Princess Bride is usually regarded as Goldman’s best novel. Rob Reiner’s excellent film adaptation of…
The Princess Bride – Setting – Fantasy Elements
The Fantasy Novel Goldman published The Princess Bride at a time when the fantasy novel was gaining popularity. Much of the new interest in fantasy was fueled by the success of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit (1937) and the Lord of the Rings trilogy (1954–55), which became extremely popular in the United States in…
The Princess Bride – Literary Devices – Parody – Symbolism
Parody The novel is part fairy tale, part fantasy, part adventure, and part romance, but it is all these things only with a twist. The author is familiar with these genres and is determined to parody them. A parody is a spoof in which something— a style, a genre—is imitated only to make fun of…
The Princess Bride – Characters
Queen Bella Queen Bella is King Lotharon’s wife and Prince Humperdinck’s stepmother. He calls her the evil stepmother, but actually she is sweet and considerate and much beloved in the kingdom. Buttercup Buttercup grows up on a farm and at the age of fifteen is potentially one of the most beautiful women in the world….
The Princess Bride – Themes
The Unfairness of Life The reader might expect this fantasy romantic/ adventure novel to follow the usual pattern of such stories: good is always rewarded, evil perishes, and the good characters live happily ever after. But this is not entirely the case in The Princess Bride. The author is at pains to show that life…
The Princess Bride – Story Summary
Introduction The Princess Bride begins with an introduction in which Goldman explains the (fictional) origin of the book. At ten years old, William is lying in bed recuperating from pneumonia, and his immigrant father reads to him from a book called The Princess Bride, written by S. Morgenstern, a great author. Like Goldman’s father, Morgenstern…
The Power and the Glory – Analysis – Essay
Graham Greene has been called a theoretical or automatic writer, in that he uses the objective perspective, with his narrative point of view roaming around from one image to another and one scene to the next without much commentary. In The Power and the Glory, for example, he presents a man on the run from…
The Power and the Glory – Literary Devices
Nameless Characters Graham Greene does not give names to several of the key characters in this novel. Readers never even find out the name of the book’s protagonist, who is identified only as ‘‘the priest’’ or ‘‘the whiskey priest.’’ To retain his anonymity, Greene must resort to such obvious omission as having him tell a…
The Power and the Glory – Historical Background – Setting
This novel takes place in Tabasco, a state in Mexico, during the 1930s. Tabasco was the state where the most extreme ideas of the Mexican Revolution were implemented, where intense poverty caused a backlash against the social order that had oppressed the peasantry for more than a century. In the early years of the twentieth…
The Power and the Glory – Themes – Symbols
Catholicism The priest in The Power and the Glory finds his plans for escape foiled on several occasions because he feels that it is his responsibility to perform certain functions. Several times, for instance, he is asked to put his flight on hold because people need him to stay with them and hear their confessions….