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What happens here that you aren't going to read is the six-page soliloquy from Inigo in which Morgenstern, through Inigo, reflects on the anguish of fleeting glory. The reason for the soliloquy here is that Morgenstern's previous book had gotten bombed by the critics and also hadn't sold beans. (Aside-did you know that Robert Browning's first book of poems didn't sell one copy? True. Even his mother didn't buy it at her local bookstore. Have you ever heard anything more humiliating?….)
This quote reminds us that we are, in fact, at the mercy of William Goldman's interpretation of the story. There is no order to what we can and cannot read other than that we cannot read that which our author/editor finds boring. Here, William Goldman finds the fleeting glory passage tedious, but in his chatty, conversational manner decides to tell us about Robert Browning, who has nothing at all to do with the story we are reading. We are subject to our author's tangents as we read, and it us our decision whether to appreciate them as part of the story. We note here that William Goldman does not even print everything that "S. Morgenstern" wrote. In this way, he frees us to appreciate his version of the book, as we will take what we want from it, and disregard the rest. This book is more than anything else about author's freedom, and the flip side of that is reader's freedom.

This quote reminds us that we are, in fact, at the mercy of William Goldman's interpretation of the story. There is no order to what we can and cannot read other than that we cannot read that which our author/editor finds boring. Here, William Goldman finds the fleeting glory passage tedious, but in his chatty, conversational manner decides to tell us about Robert Browning, who has nothing at all to do with the story we are reading. We are subject to our author's tangents as we read, and it us our decision whether to appreciate them as part of the story. We note here that William Goldman does not even print everything that "S. Morgenstern" wrote. In this way, he frees us to appreciate his version of the book, as we will take what we want from it, and disregard the rest. This book is more than anything else about author's freedom, and the flip side of that is reader's freedom.

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