The Lady or the Tiger

The fairytale ‘The Lady or the Tiger’ is a fantasy story. Nevertheless, the story itself is examined to be more fanciful and unrestricted than other fantasy fairytales. The story comprises of a spiteful king, an envious princess and an ardent suitor-long the staple elements of fairy tales. Enclosed in this fairy-tale are three major factors that make the story so vital: the style, structure, use of language and the story’s ending; are all things that must be considered.
At the end of the story, Stockton does not tell the reader what lay behind the door. As an alternative, the storyteller states ‘that the more one reflects on this question, the more one reflects on this question, the more difficult it is to understand the human heart’. Stockton informs the person who reads that they should dwell on what they would do; rather, to place themselves in the mind of the princess. The narrator portrays the princess as ‘semi-barbaric’ and quick tempered and ‘her soul at a white heat beneath the combine fires of despair and jealousy’.
The structure of the ‘fairytale’ is quite ironic. This means that it was unintentional and unforeseen. A customary fairytale would be different when comparing to a narrative. The storyteller uses this in sequence to anticipate the story and force the reader to go into a new ‘state of mind’ when reading. This prevents them to make the individual conclusion of working out who came out of the door. Stockton uses metaphorical language and the characters to presage what’s going to occur in the story. This contributes this out since deprived from being so evocative, the reader would not have slight, if not no knowledge on what might happen and why.
In a section of the story it says ‘This semi-barbaric king had a daughter as blooming as his most florid fancies, and with a soul as fervent and imperious as his own. As is usual in such cases, she was the apple of his eye, and was loved by him above all humanity’. The expressive metaphoric language