The Lady Or The Tiger Essay Questions

In The Lady or the Tiger? by Frank R. Stockton, questions are raised about morality and making hard decisions. Throughout the story, the power of selfishness and barbarism versus the weight of love and selflessness is presented, but no real answer as to which is the overpowering characteristics in the princess. The author manages the question as one to be answered differently from person to person.

In The Lady or the Tiger?, the princess appears to love the man in the arena, and would be intensely guilty if she’d been responsible for his horrible death. Throughout the story, it is made clear that the princess is in love with someone she cannot have, and it’s plausible she would allow him to marry a beautiful maiden instead because she is unable to justify letting him die. At one point, it the narrator ponders, “How often, in her waking hours and in her dreams, had she started in wild horror, and covered her face with her hands as she thought of her lover opening the door on the other side of which waited the cruel fangs of the tiger” (Stockton, 303)! By mentioning this,

This point is noted by the narrator, having argued that, “Would it not be better for him to die at once, and go to wait for her in the blessed regions of semibarbaric futurity” (Stockton, 304)? This question is phrased rhetorically, as though it is absurd to not realize that it would be better to just let the princess’s lover be killed. It coincides with what the narrator had proposed earlier, having acknowledged the idea of the princess leading her lover to the beautiful maiden rather than the vicious tiger. Both sides are well-represented throughout the story, yet neither side is taken, leaving the answer up to the