Love, Loyalty, and Friendship Theme Analysis

Within the frame stories and in The Princess Bride itself, the novel's characters are confronted with questions of what it means to be a good friend, parent, or partner. While “abridging” The Princess Bride, Goldman must learn to connect with his son Jason, whom he's criticized heavily for years due to Jason's weight. In the core story, Buttercup and Westley's relationship is held up as the epitome of true love only because the nonsensical authorities that Goldman and Morgenstern invoke say it is, while the genuine affection and concern for each other that Inigo and Fezzik demonstrate presents a far more compelling example of what genuine companionship looks like. In this way, the novel begins to pick at the power of these arbitrary rubrics of love and loyalty, while suggesting that a more successful and reasonable way to measure the relative quality of love or friendship is through the actions of the people involved.

In The Princess Bride, Morgenstern often references on rankings of things like beautiful women, kisses, and perfect couples. Buttercup, he insists, becomes the most beautiful woman in her early twenties, while her kiss with Westley shoots immediately to the top of the rankings of perfect kisses. The kiss rankings also suggest that Westley and Buttercup's love is true, meant to be, and more perfect than any other kind of love. Of course, such ranking systems—though presented as objective fact within the world of the novel—are patently ridiculous ways to measure subjective qualities like love and beauty. What’s more, Westley and Buttercup's actual interactions suggests isn't that their relationship isn’t so perfect after all. While Goldman notes that it's normal for couples to fight, Buttercup and Westley don't just fight: Westley is verbally and at times physically abusive towards Buttercup. For her part, Buttercup's treatment of Westley in the beginning of the story—when he works on her parents' farm—is objectively cruel: she dismissively calls him Farm Boy and orders him around for the sake of feeling powerful. Though all of this is presented in a light-hearted and satirical tone, the novel nevertheless implicitly encourages readers to take its rankings and assessments with a serious grain of salt, and to question what really constitutes the “perfect” or “best” of anything.

Though the narrator of The Princess Bride says nothing outright about Fezzik and Inigo (or indeed, about any of the numerous relationships in the novel that are kinder and more functional than that between Westley and Buttercup), their friendship offers readers an example of what true companionship looks like. Fezzik is wildly insecure about everything except his strength. He's not particularly smart, he's embarrassingly fond of rhymes, and his greatest fear is being left alone. While the Sicilian Vizzini manipulates these qualities to his advantage, Inigo gently and kindly meets Fezzik where he is. He happily participates in Fezzik's rhyming games and even makes up rhymes for Fezzik that help him remember Vizzini's instructions. Most meaningfully for both Fezzik and Inigo, the two work together and combine their strengths to infiltrate Prince Humperdinck's Zoo of Death so that they can find Westley and accomplish their other goals. During their descent through the Zoo's five levels, Inigo and Fezzik use their knowledge of the other's fears to offer encouragement as they continue, and, importantly, they do this so that they can help each other—not for one or the other's sole gain or for the sake of being cruel.

With this, Goldman crafts a story that offers readers a lesson in how to evaluate relationships, whether romantic or platonic, and suggests that more important than nonsensical rankings is being able to carefully look at how someone treats another person.