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As to Inigo's personal life, he was always just a trifle hungry, he had no brothers or sisters, and his mother had died in childbirth. He was fantastically happy. Because of his father. Domingo Montoya was funny-looking and crotchety and impatient and absent-minded and never smiled. Inigo loved him. Totally. Don't ask why. There really wasn't any one reason you could put your finger on. Oh, probably Domingo loved him back, but love is many things, none of them logical.
This quote parodies some of the same fairy-tale values as the above quote, but here another element is thrown into the mockery barrel: arbitrariness. So many of the sequences occurring in this story, as well as the mode of story-telling itself, are completely arbitrary. This quote precedes the description of Yeste, Spain's greatest sword-maker, who takes his back-orders to Domingo, who is killed by one of the customers, who in turn plunges Inigo into his study of sword-fighting for his revenge-role in this story. The story stresses how disorderly crucial events often are, and how events and emotions happen often for no purpose at all, a simple parody of human relations. After all, Buttercup has no interest in Westley until the Countess does, and Inigo loves his father deeply for apparently no reason at all. This is just how people work, and one can imagine William Goldman saying gleefully, "Isn't it glorious?" Furthermore, the version of the story that we read is also based on how William Goldman heard it as a child. He implies that through any other telling, we would find different parts to be significant, but when his father read it to him, the adventure—Buttercup's story—was the crux, as it is to us in his retelling. The very style of this writing—short, restless, perhaps irrational statements—is an amusing and effective way of setting us up for a certain kind of tale, then disproving our expectations.

This quote parodies some of the same fairy-tale values as the above quote, but here another element is thrown into the mockery barrel: arbitrariness. So many of the sequences occurring in this story, as well as the mode of story-telling itself, are completely arbitrary. This quote precedes the description of Yeste, Spain's greatest sword-maker, who takes his back-orders to Domingo, who is killed by one of the customers, who in turn plunges Inigo into his study of sword-fighting for his revenge-role in this story. The story stresses how disorderly crucial events often are, and how events and emotions happen often for no purpose at all, a simple parody of human relations. After all, Buttercup has no interest in Westley until the Countess does, and Inigo loves his father deeply for apparently no reason at all. This is just how people work, and one can imagine William Goldman saying gleefully, "Isn't it glorious?" Furthermore, the version of the story that we read is also based on how William Goldman heard it as a child. He implies that through any other telling, we would find different parts to be significant, but when his father read it to him, the adventure—Buttercup's story—was the crux, as it is to us in his retelling. The very style of this writing—short, restless, perhaps irrational statements—is an amusing and effective way of setting us up for a certain kind of tale, then disproving our expectations.

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