The Lady, or the Tiger?

The king’s fanciful way of rendering judgment calls into question the notion of justice as it is defined in “The Lady, or the Tiger?” The narrator, who might be a version of Stockton himself, uses irony to present the king’s idea of justice in an emphatically positive light while implicitly demonstrating the flaws in this fundamentally illogical system. In this subverted fairy tale, Stockton examines the concept of justice in a humorous, satirical way that engages the reader’s own judgment.

Throughout the text, the narrator’s emphatic claims draw on seemingly universal concepts like fairness, impartiality, and rationality to give credibility to an irrational system. Whether he praises the “perfect fairness” of the trials and their “positively determinate [decisions]” (Paragraph 7), or the king’s ability to not “hesitate nor waver in regard to his duty” (Paragraph 9), the narrator imbues the public arena with positive qualities and relies on the reader’s assent. He also argues that “this vast amphitheater [...] was an agent of poetic justice, in which crime was punished, or virtue rewarded, by the decrees of an impartial and incorruptible chance” (Paragraph 3). In short, the narrator offers indisputable truths about the need for fair and objective justice to preemptively counter any criticism of the trials.