Similarities between the King from "The Lady or the Tiger" and the Sniper from "The Sniper"

Although both the king and the sniper are two like minded individuals in the sense that they both have the audacity to kill other people without much forethought, the sniper is more shown as a soldier fighting for a war just doing what he has to do, whereas the king is shown to be just a selfish ruler who does whatever he wants simply because he can and because he thinks it is the best way to go about dealing with all of the criminal justice in the town.

The sniper in the story is described as “a man who is used to looking at death” (O’Flaherty p.1). Throughout the story, the sniper manages to instinctively kill person after person without any remorse or even the slightest sign of emotion. He even managed to kill an old woman simply because she was a possible informant and a threat to his safety. After killing another one of his regular enemies near the end the story though, strangely he becomes overwhelmed with a sense of grief and sorrow for what he was doing. At first you would think this indicates that the sniper was not necessarily a blood hungry person driven by the desire to kill others. Instead, he seems more like just a soldier doing his job because he has to and trying not to think about the fact that what he has been doing all along was actually against his morals. However, moments after this sudden realization that he has, he throws his gun to the ground which triggers it to fire, and it just goes past the side of his head. After this, he gets knocked back into “reality” and laughs it off like it is nothing. Because of this, it is hard to clearly see if he is truly just a soldier doing his job or in fact a horrible person who enjoys killing simply for the fun of it.

The king in the story is described as “a man of exuberant fancy, and, withal, of an authority so irresistible that, at his will, he turned his varied fancies into facts” (Stockton p.1). During the start of the story, there is some talk of the king’s arena. Because the king is indeed a man of exuberant fancy who turned his fancies into facts, he decided to make a place called the kings arena for the criminal justice of the town to be decided in a manner than the king saw was fit. The way that the system works is the fate of an individual accused of a certain crime is decided by said individual opening one of 2 doors. Behind one door is a ferocious tiger ready to kill the accused person. Behind another door however, is a beautiful woman ready to marry the individual. The 2 doors each represent innocence (the one with the woman behind it) and guilt (the one with the tiger behind it), and it is assumed by the people at the time that if the person opening the door chooses the tiger, they are guilty of their crime, and if the person gets the beautiful women, they are assumed to be innocent. The fact that the king thinks that this system is an effective way of dealing with criminal justice perhaps shows how barbaric and evil the king is. The fact that he is willing to possibly kill someone by giving them a 50/50 chance of being ripped to shreds by a tiger simply because he thinks that it is actually a fair way of deciding whether a culprit is innocent or guilty.

In conclusion, the sniper and the king both share the trait of wanting to kill other people because they think that is what they need to do. Aside from that, they really did not have very much else in common. In fact, even the desire to kill in both of them was at a quite different level for both of them. The sniper was simply doing his job as a soldier by killing his enemies whether he enjoyed it or not and even showed signs of remorse for his actions at one point later on in the story. The king however, was a king. A person who called all the shots and made all the decisions for the place he ruled. So he did not actually have to kill anyone with his criminal justice system if he really did not want to. However, he did in fact want to do that, so that is what he ended up doing simply because he thought it was the fairest way to go about dealing with the criminal justice in the town.