'The Princess Bride' and the Inconceivably Fun Framing Device
In the novel, the framing device cuts to the heart of the story.
The movie The Princess Bride has a straightforward framing device. A grandfather is reading a story to his grandson, and the kid occasionally interjects with some commentary. It adds color, helps set the tone, and never distracts from the main story. It does its job.
The novel The Princess Bride has a more elaborate framing device. William Goldman wrote both the novel and the screenplay, and he clearly understood what each medium allows. The 98-minute movie strips everything down to its essence while retaining ample fun, but the original 1973 novel offers so much more room to play. More detail, more backstory, more framing device. Longer title, even: The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern’s Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure.
This version gives us an extended set-up, and Goldman writes a fictitious version of himself into that set-up. It shouldn’t work, but Goldman is self-deprecating enough to pull it off. Plus, the faux-autobiographical approach enhances the sense of authenticity, even though he’s blatantly fabricating an imaginary family and inventing a fictitious country.
The Princess Bride is a book within the book, a World War I–era Florinese masterpiece that Goldman’s father used to read to him. Goldman hadn’t ever read it himself, though—it was his father’s story to tell, so young Billy wouldn’t dream of even touching the book.
As an adult, Goldman tracks down a copy to give to his own son, and he discovers that his father read him only “the good parts.” Swashbuckling adventure. Soaring romance. Life-and-death struggles. Good people facing off against bad people. Daring escapes. Everything that could excite a child’s imagination.
But there was so much more that we would not consider “the good parts.”
Goldman describes when he “began to realize the problem”:
“Not that the description wasn’t there. It was, and again pretty much as I remembered it. But before you got to it, there were maybe sixty pages of text dealing with Prince Humperdinck’s ancestry and how his family got control of Florin and this wedding and that child begetting this one over here who then married somebody else, and then I skipped to the third chapter, The Courtship, and that was all about the history of Guilder and how that country reached its place in the world. The more I flipped on, the more I knew: Morgenstern wasn’t writing any children’s book; he was writing a kind of satiric history of his country and the decline of the monarchy in Western civilization.”
Thus, Goldman decides to create an abridgment of his old childhood favorite, leaving only “the good parts” intact. And that’s The Princess Bride that we all know and love.
But the framing device doesn’t end there. It’s not just a prelude that we can skip past. Throughout the novel, Goldman slips in various italicized notes explaining what he cut.
The second chapter opens with Goldman confessing to his first significant excision.
“This chapter is where my son Jason stopped reading, and there is simply no way of blaming him. For what Morgenstern has done is open his chapter with sixty-six pages of Florinese history. More accurately, it is the history of Florinese crown.”
The note continues with Goldman wondering why the original author halted the narrative momentum so early in the book, and he can only surmise that to Morgenstern, the real story wasn’t Buttercup’s remarkable experiences—it was really about big ideas like the monarchy.
How can you not love notes like this?
“When this version comes out, I expect every Florinese scholar alive to slaughter me.”
Goldman excises the entire fourth chapter, which his father would summarize as “What with one thing and another, three years passed.”
Those three years take up 105 pages in Morgenstern’s unabridged book. Fictitious readers of the fictitious original were treated to 15 pages explaining why Humperdinck couldn’t marry a commoner and how Buttercup became Princess of Hammersmith, 18 pages of a miracle man treating the king because Morgenstern loathed doctors, and 72 pages of Buttercup training to be a princess.
“He follows Buttercup day to day, month to month, as she learns all the ways of curtsying and tea pouring and how to address visiting nabobs and like that. All this in a satiric vein, naturally, since Morgenstern hated royalty even more than doctors.”
But, as Goldman emphasizes, nothing happens in those 105 pages story-wise, except what his father said: “What with one thing and another, three years passed.”
As someone with a B.A. in English, I think Goldman’s framing device here is ingenious. Many old novels were over-written by today’s standards. They contained asides, tangents, and excessive details that slowed things down for no discernible narrative reasons. And that may have worked back then, but it’s a slog to read now.
Victor Hugo was guilty of this. He inserts blatant essays into The Hunchback of Notre Dame. One chapter is called “A Bird’s-Eye View of Paris,” and it is precisely that. For 26 pages in my paperback edition, Hugo describes Paris. Not the characters, not any action. Just Paris. On its own, it might be a fine essay, but I could barely bring myself to skim through it because I wanted to get back to the story.
Here's a little snippet plucked at random: “There are thus, to sum up the points to which we have alluded, three sorts of scars now disfiguring Gothic architecture …”
Cut through all that excess, though, and you’ll find a strong, engaging story. Same goes for The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky. That’s a massive novel that I need to read again to fully appreciate, but the main thing I recall is that some chapters were undeniably brilliant while others dragged on and on.
If the great books of the past were written today, good developmental editors would push the authors to avoid any prolonged tangents or excessive descriptions and to focus on what serves the story. “The good parts,” we might say.
To be clear, I don’t believe in rewriting the works of the past. They can inspire reinterpretations by modern authors, but the original works need to remain intact without further edits. There’s a place for clearly labeled abridgments, though. And fictitious abridgments.
Goldman’s framing device in the novel The Princess Bride not only adds flavor—it also reminds us where a story’s heart lies.
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