The Six-Fingered Man
The emotional center of The Princess Bride is not located within the love story of Buttercup and Westley, which is not different in any significant way from any of the love stories which inspired it. No, the emotional investment for readers is in Inigo Montoya’s enduring quest to find the six-fingered man that killed his father before his very eyes when he was a child. Who would ever do such a thing, much less for no better reason than consumer dissatisfaction? The imagery of the superfluous digit on Count Rugen effectively removes him from the mainstream of society; he is a freak of nature physically and but even more so on the inside.
Buttercup's Walk Among the Commoners
Chapter Five: The Announcement begins with an elegant bit of imagery that is filled with thematic import. When Prince Humperdinck first introduces his bride-to-be to the people of his kingdom, they are breathless with admiration at her great beauty. Such admiration is nothing compared to what they feel when she when she goes against Humperdinck’s direction that royalty does not mingle with commoners and crosses the Great Square right there among the commoners. The image of the beautiful Buttercup recognizing that she belongs not to class that looks down upon the people, but to the class that is looked down upon is striking less because it proves she is still humble than because it generates respect for her in the reader: this is not a princess bride, this is a rebel.
The Man in Black
The identity of the Man in Black coolly pursuing the men who kidnapped Buttercup is not reveal for some time. There is absolutely no reason in the world to suspect that it is Westley since Buttercup’s grief indicates that she believes that he is dead. The imagery associated with his all-black attire is vital for maintaining the suspense of who he might be without giving away that it might just be Westley. The legacy of romantic literature which informs The Princess Bride is inevitably associated with the mythology of the Old West for American readers not raised on the sword and castle literature of the Europeans. And as every American knows, the stranger riding a horse into town dressed all in black is inevitably going to turn out to be villain. So this image of a man in black carries intense connotations of villainy which further dislocates the expectation that he will turn out to be the dead Westley.
The Ending
The ending of the actual narrative of The Princess Bride—not Goldman’s abridgement, but Morgenstern’s Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure—is a paragraph that is almost entirely imagery: Inigo starts bleeding again, Westley returns to a state between life and death, a horseshoe flies off the steed on which Buttercup is perched and an ominous thunder of a pursuing army threatens to drown out every other sound. The connection of this imagery to the central thematic core of the novel—that life isn’t fair—is overpowering. Quite simply, there is probably no other way to bring the story to a close than the way it which does draw to a close. Who can’t relate to the imagery of something going wrong just when it seemed live everything was finally going to be okay at last.
