How Is The Story Told In William Goldman's The Princess Bride: Summary

The Princess Bride: A fairy tale for adult The Princess Bride is an unconventional adventure and romantic fairy tale written by William Goldman. It does include princess and prince in the story, but they do not fall in love with each other following the conventional fairly tale routine. Goldman uses parody of romantic plots and frame narrative in order to attract cynical and realistic adult readers. The Princess Bride’s plots disrupt the convention of fairy tale, since the Prince is a negative figure. In general fairy tale, a prince should marry with a princess and they live happily forever, just like the Cinderella’s story. However, in The Princess Bride, the prince Humperdinck is a bad guy. At last, the princess lives happily

The historical author is William Goldman. The narrator is Billy’s father. In this book, the role of frame narrative is to group different pieces of The Princess Bride together: “The basic function of a frame story is to provide a narrative context for other tales and to blind this together within that context. A frame story allows a wide variety of tales to be grouped together.” At the start of the book, Goldman introduces a little boy named Billy. Billy’s radio cannot get the football game, and he is very upset. Then, his father, as a narrator, starts to tell the story of The Princess Bride: “‘Chapter one, the bride.’ He held up the book then. ‘I am reading it to you for relax.’ He practically shoved the book in my face.” The real story comes when Billy’s father starts to read the book, which brings all the readers into the story of Buttercup and Westley. Billy’s questions and queries push the story forward. Without Billy, it seems like there is no reason the narrator keep telling The Princess Bride. Furthermore, “The frame tale transports readers and listeners into its context, and they must see, hear and judge the tale in that scope.” Because Billy keeps asking some naïve questions and expressing his ideas as a child, the thought of Billy usually responds to the thought of the readers. For example, when Buttercup is surrounded by sharks, Billy worries about Buttercup very much. However, for adult readers, they know that Buttercup must alive since she is a main figure of the story. Billy’s questions and worries make the reader can read the fairy tale in a children’s scope, so they can enjoy the story without worrying about the boring which brings by the predictable