If you’ve time and are interested, I’d like to ask all of you, who’are familiar with Frank R. Stockton’s short stories, to discuss or try to answer the question asked in “The Lady or the Tiger?” : Which came out of the opened door - the lady, or the tiger?
I just came across this story yesterday - thanks my learning of English - and I can’t help thinking about it!
Thank you!
“Think of it, fair reader, not as if the decision of the question depended upon yourself, but upon that hot-blooded, semi-barbaric princess, her soul at a white heat beneath the combined fires of despair and jealousy”
Hot-blooded, semi-barbaric, … I go for the tiger. I’m sure the couple has already reunited “in the blessed regions of semi-barbaric futurity”.
Wonderful story!
Thank you, @ftornay, for your thought! It’s tragic isn’t? I can’t believe it!
It’s tragic but the “happy ending” would be vulgar, and semi-barbaric princesses can’t allow that.
And, of course, there’s also the question of whether the knight could foresee the princess’s quandary and act in consequence (maybe opening the left door) and whether the princess would, in turn, take that possibility into account, and so on in an endless recursive loop, something similar to this:
