The roots of the fairy tale stretch back to a time before literature, when storytelling was essentially an oral form. The theme of The Princess Bride is a common one in fairy tales: the lover of a beautiful woman must show his courage and valor to save her from a fate worse than death.

Unlike most fairy tales, however, The Princess Bride has a distinctly modern tone. It contains modern sarcasm and the narrative is frequently interrupted by the secondary narrator, Goldman, who muses on the story as merely fairy tale and establishes a distance between reader and story. This distancing is an apology of sorts for the violence and the absurdity of a story that often lampoons traditional fairy tale conventions.