The Princess Bride Character Analysis

In the Princess Bride the author William Goldman decides to kill off Wesley the main character of the romance comedy. But when he does he has a strange drawback and has the sudden realization of what he had just done. He mourns, grieves, and finds himself in his very own “Pit of Despair.” Yet how can this be, he had never experienced such a tragedy himself, but in his writing of a fictional fantasy character he is overwhelmed with these genuine emotions. Sentiments and actions are easier to access and put into writing if one has already experienced the event. Skilled authors can write pieces without experience by using similar emotions and merging them to create what one would expect to feel. The more believable the world that is conjured is to the audience the more they will be impacted by tragedies and trials in a story. A true

Goldman was not writing out of experience when he had killed Wesley, but he had known the character and the world with which Wesley was involved. An example of this in other works such as Dante’s Inferno written by Dante Alighieri. Dante writes about an extraordinary tale of how he descends to hell with the Roman poet Virgil and describes the layers of hell as he goes. Even though he never had gone to hell to describe it he uses what he knows through the speeches of others and the beliefs at the time. All to create a dramatic and very profound poetic message. Writers are able to create meaning and depth by comparing feelings from their own life to that of their writing works. Someone in his family may not have died to cause such emotions, however he could have been combining things from his past that had brought upon similar emotions. But these feelings from William Goldman would not have been felt if he had not truly believed he had completely slain Wesley and this is where the realistic world is