The Lady, or the Tiger?

“In the very olden time there lived a semi-barbaric king.”

The opening echoes typical fairy tale introductions (e.g., “once upon a time” and “there once lived a king”), placing the story in an unnamed kingdom, in an unspecified past. By anchoring the story in this genre, the author sets up the readers’ expectations: they will now anticipate fairy tale tropes, which the author will be able to meet or subvert for satirical purposes.

“[T]here lived a semi-barbaric king, whose ideas, though somewhat polished and sharpened by the progressiveness of distant Latin neighbors, were still large, florid, and untrammeled, as became the half of him which was barbaric.”

In this first description of the king, his duality is made evident: he is polished and progressive, while at the same time barbaric and authoritarian. This contrast is what arguably makes him “semi-barbaric,” which is the term that is most often used throughout the story to describe him and serves to highlight the discrepancy between his ideas and his actions.

“He was greatly given to self-communing, and, when he and himself agreed upon anything, the thing was done.”

The narrator uses a slightly pompous tone that suggests he admires the king, but this attitude does not reflect the absurd behavior that he describes. The king’s habit of “self-communing” is in fact authoritarianism, disguised here as a rational thinking process. This contrast between the tone and the content of the sentence creates irony.